Senior Product Designer

Who We Are

Summer is a Certified B Corp® on a mission to restore financial freedom for the 46 million Americans burdened by student debt. We combine deep policy expertise with powerful technology to simplify every step of college cost planning and loan repayment. We have helped people save an average of $278 per month and more than $1.8 billion in total savings to date.

By partnering with leading employers, cities, and financial institutions, including ADP, the City of New York, Banc of California, Norton Healthcare, and the American Federation of Teachers, Summer helps millions of Americans move closer to a debt-free future.

Backed by $30 million in funding from top investors including Rebalance Capital, SemperVirens, QED Investors, General Catalyst, and Flourish Ventures, we’re building the infrastructure that powers student loan relief and education affordability in America.

Your Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior Product Designer to join our dynamic Product, Engineering, Design, and Data (PEDD) team. As Senior Product Designer, you will play a pivotal role in creating experiences that help our users navigate complex financial situations with confidence and ease while driving the evolution of our design systems and practices. You will serve as primary designer for some of our product experiences, while collaborating with peers in other pods to ensure consistency, evolve best practices, and collectively level up the quality of our solutions. We are seeking candidates who:

• Approach every design challenge with creativity, strategic thinking, and user empathy, delivering experiences that are useful, usable, and desirable;
• Are excited about turning complex problems into elegant, simple solutions that serve people at scale in meaningful ways; and
• Thrive in fast-paced, collaborative environments, balancing the ability to go deep into design details with stepping back to connect the dots strategically.

If this sounds like you, come join us as we build innovative solutions that help millions of student loan borrowers achieve billions of dollars in savings.

What You’ll Do

• Strategic Design Leadership: Apply strategic thinking to design and deliver innovative end-to-end user experiences that optimize among user needs, business goals, and technological realities across web and mobile platforms.

  Vision & Storytelling: Act as a masterful storyteller, able to influence a broad audience by visualizing ideas and concepts for internal leaders, partners, and customers, bringing bold design visions to life across multiple areas of our ecosystem.

  Experience Design: Turn visions into concepts and translate those concepts into designs that illustrate simplicity despite the complexity of the system, delivering user experience visions, specifications, wireframes, and prototypes that resonate on an emotional level.

  Design Systems Leadership: Design/maintain components and patterns with an eye for accessibility in close collaboration with brand, product design teams, and business requirements. Advocate for design system adoption throughout teams, acting as a subject matter expert to other designers and developers implementing our design direction.

  Cross-Functional Collaboration: Use facilitative leadership skills to drive the best outcomes for multiple stakeholders across a matrixed organization, bridging design and development to ensure cohesion across design and code implementation.

  Process Innovation: Work across business units to define and improve collaboration and processes that enable the team to deliver with speed and quality. Surface opportunities to improve processes, deliverables, and customer experiences. Push practical and compliant tool adoption whether adopting AI tools for quick iteration, automating accessibility audits or any other efficiency multiplier that visibly improves team velocity or product consistency.

  Continuous Improvement: Balance long-term considerations with continuously shipping, iterating, and evolving design systems and experiences, inspiring others to learn from you and want to work with you.

You Might Be a Fit If You Have

• Bachelor's degree in Human-Computer Interaction, Graphic Design, or other relevant field. A graduate degree is a plus. We also welcome equivalent work experience that brings valuable insight to the team.
• Proven track record of 5+ years of interface design experience delivering high-volume, high-profile, or accessible products across multiple platforms.
• Expert knowledge and experience driving and applying user-centered design processes while working collaboratively with customers and cross-functional teams including engineering, product management, and user research. Seasoned in partnering with engineering and product management on collaborative delivery.
• Experience working in technically complex initiatives with the ability to seamlessly marry user experiences with technical architecture.
• Deep knowledge of user experience methods, innovation, ideation, storytelling, prototyping, design frameworks, concept visualization, problem-framing skills, and design principles.
• Demonstrated success in setting a vision for great customer experiences, inspiring others to get behind the vision, and ultimately delivering products and services known for their delightful experience and ease of use.
• Exemplary ability to build positive, collaborative relationships across teams, groups, and functions through facilitative leadership to deliver great results and "raise the bar" continually as an effective leader of positive change.
• Organized, self-directed, and efficient with the ability to manage multiple complex projects in a timely manner.
• Strong online portfolio available for viewing with full case studies that show the design thinking process.
• Nice to have: Experience with fintech, consumer financial services, or complex form design.

The Details

Compensation: $155-175K + equity + comprehensive benefits (for FTE roles only)
Work Setup: Remote (U.S.)
Status: Full-time

Work Environment

Summer is a remote-first company with team members across the U.S. We collaborate asynchronously and meet virtually each week, with in-person gatherings for key moments during the year.

Why Join Summer

Summer is on a mission to help borrowers navigate and eliminate student debt. We partner with financial institutions, employers, and government agencies to provide digital tools that simplify the loan experience for millions of borrowers.

We’re a mission-driven team that believes in solving real problems with real empathy. We care deeply about our users and each other. If you’re excited about building technology that changes lives, we’d love to meet you.

How We Support You

• Equity grant to share in Summer’s success
• 100% employee-covered medical, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) plan with 3% match, fully vested day one
• Home office setup reimbursement
• Monthly lunch credits
• Direct contributions toward your student loans
• Up to 11 paid holidays + flexible PTO
• Paid leave for family, health, or personal needs
• Annual in-person events including Summer Camp and Summer Wonderland
• And more!

Equal Opportunity

Summer provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination or harassment of any kind. This policy applies to all employment terms and conditions, including recruiting, hiring, promotion, termination, compensation, and training.