Senior Vice President, Product Design Lead, Platform, AI Hub

BNY Mellon•Pittsburgh, PA

22h

About The Position

The way products are built has changed. If you know how an .md file becomes experience design, this role may be for you. At BNY, our culture allows us to run our company better and enables employees' growth and success. As a leading global financial services company at the heart of the global financial system, we influence nearly 20% of the world's investible assets. Every day, our teams harness cutting-edge AI and breakthrough technologies to collaborate with clients, driving transformative solutions that redefine industries and uplift communities worldwide. Recognized as a top destination for innovators, BNY is where bold ideas meet advanced technology and exceptional talent. Together, we power the future of finance. Join us and be part of something extraordinary. We're seeking a future team member for the role of Senior Vice President, Product Design Lead, Platform, AI Hub to join our team. This role is located in Pittsburgh, PA. How we work Design, product, and engineering work from a shared repo: a single source of truth that spans research insights, personas, strategy, and prototypes. Work doesn't move from design to engineering; it emerges through co-creation. Prototypes come before prioritization. Decisions are demonstrated, not just discussed. Presentations get generated from the same source as the product. We believe the shifts happening with AI are enabling us to spend more time on what design is actually for: crafting deeply user-centric experiences with deliberate outcomes. We're changing quickly, and we're doing it on purpose. The person in this role doesn't just adapt to that shift; they help lead it. About this role We're looking for a design leader who can own a platform's end-to-end experience, one who brings strategic clarity to complex problem spaces, can move fast when the moment calls for it, and operates as a peer to product and engineering leadership. Not a downstream partner. This is a senior individual contributor role. You'll set the design direction for a major platform, drive consistency and coherence across a large and complex surface area, and raise the quality bar across design practice: through the work itself, through critique, through the example you set. Prior domain expertise in financial services matters less than your ability to learn fast, ask the right questions, and apply rigorous design thinking to unfamiliar and genuinely hard problems.

Requirements

Demonstrated experience leading design for complex, large-scale platforms, ideally in regulated, high-stakes, or enterprise environments
Ability to learn new domains rapidly and design effectively without being a subject-matter expert before day one
Systems-level thinking: you see the whole experience, not just the screen in front of you
Strong design craft alongside strategic design thinking. These aren't separate skills for you
Proven track record of influencing product and engineering decisions through design, not around them
10-12 years of experience in product design, with meaningful time spent in senior or lead individual contributor roles

Nice To Haves

You've already incorporated AI-assisted tools into how you design and prototype, not as a curiosity, but as a working method
You've worked in environments where design, product, and engineering share a codebase or unified source of truth
You think about design systems as infrastructure: not just component libraries, but the grammar that produces consistent, intentional experiences at scale, readable by humans and AI agents alike
You've navigated organizational complexity at a senior level and made design more coherent and higher-quality as a result
You see the current moment in design (AI-assisted tooling, prototype-first thinking, cross-functional co-creation) and you've already started moving toward it
You don't need a defined process handed to you; you help define what good process looks like
You're excited about a design practice that operates closer to the material than traditional design workflows allow
You have a deep understanding of the opportunity that AI creates for design, and you bring the energy and conviction to help lead others through it

Responsibilities

Own platform design strategy.
Define and maintain the design vision for a complex platform.
Operate from first principles when needed.
Bring coherence to experiences that have grown up across many teams and many years.
Demonstrate before you describe.
Use prototyping and rapid concept work to make design strategy tangible.
In a world where AI tools can close the gap between intent and working experience, the best design leaders don't wait for resourcing.
They show the possibility first.
Work at the intersection of systems and users.
Connect workflows, data, and interaction patterns across the platform.
Know when to zoom in on a specific friction point and when to step back and redesign the underlying model.
Lead design in a cross-functional environment.
Partner with product and engineering as a peer, not as a hand-off point, but as a co-creator.
Influence product strategy and technical decisions by grounding them in user evidence and design quality.
Shape a design system built for how design works now.
The design system on this team is structured as machine-readable infrastructure.
Tokens carry semantic meaning.
Components encode the reasoning behind when and how they apply.
AI agents consume it alongside human developers.
At the SVP level, you're not just contributing to this grammar, you're shaping how it's defined and ensuring it reflects the quality and intent of the experiences we're building.
Set a high bar and transfer it.
Provide feedback and mentorship that raises the work quality of everyone around you.
Cultivate a design culture where rigor, curiosity, and user-centricity are defaults, not aspirations.
Communicate design at the executive level.
Make the case for design decisions to senior stakeholders.
Use visual storytelling to connect design choices to user impact and platform health, not as a presentation exercise, but as a leadership function.