Head of Design

Location: Remote

Orca’s vision is to build a financial system that puts people first. We envision a future where the majority of global financial transactions are driven by CLAMMs and other Decentralized Finance (DeFi) products. Our ambition reaches beyond becoming the leading provider of financial primitives in crypto—we aim to reshape the foundation of finance itself. We are building the next NASDAQ. If you are someone who is tired of just working another job and wants to build something meaningful, then we invite you to join our team.

Orca is shaping the next wave of DeFi—and our product & engineering leaders already have a bold roadmap in motion. We’re looking for a design leader who can turn that vision into world-class experiences by building a high-performing design organization.

Your north stars

1. People & process first. Coach, unblock, and scale a talented team of designers.

2. Visual craft first. Set a premium quality bar and ensure every pixel meets it.

3. Strategic influence over time. Partner closely with product leadership from day one, then expand your voice in roadmap discussions as trust and context grow.

First 3 months — Integrate & Uplift

• Embed quickly. Build strong relationships through regular 1-on-1s and active participation in design, product, and engineering rituals.

• Coach for impact. Provide hands-on feedback that sharpens visual craft and strengthens cross-functional communication.

• Smooth collaboration. Fine-tune hand-offs and feedback loops so designers, PMs, and engineers move even faster while maintaining a high quality bar.

Months 3-6 — Unify Experience & Shape Planning

• Cohesive look & feel. Establish a consistent visual language that ties product, brand, and community touch-points together.

• Become a domain voice. Demonstrate fluency in Orca’s product and users, contributing confidently to roadmap discussions.

• Guide resourcing. Align upcoming initiatives with the right design capacity and skill sets, ensuring the team stays focused on high-impact work.

Beyond 6 months — Own Design Direction & Cross-Org Alignment

• Lead quarterly design cycles. Define, track, and communicate design goals that clearly support company priorities.

• Strategic partnership. Collaborate with executives on high-level planning, then translate direction into clear, actionable mandates for the team.

• Sustain cohesion at scale. Keep brand and product design unmistakably unified while empowering designers to drive domain-level initiatives.

• Lead, mentor, and manage a team of designers.

  • Provide clear career paths, goal-setting, and regular feedback.

  • Run purposeful critiques, design reviews, and workshops that sharpen craft.

  • Champion healthy team rituals and meeting hygiene.

• Establish the vision for Orca Design, balancing long-term strategic goals with day-to-day executional excellence across product and brand.

• Elevate visual craft across the product and brand - set an inspiring, premium bar for visual and interaction design, brand consistency, and coach designers to reach it through clear guidelines, hands-on feedback, and example-setting leadership.

• Lead the evolution of our design system as a core enabler of design quality, efficiency and collaboration across teams.

• Partner cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, and Marketing to translate requirements into elegant, on-brand solutions—amplifying, not replacing, existing product leadership.

• Champion user-centricity: leverage research insights and shape metrics that connect design quality to user engagement and business impact.

• Keep us current: follow DeFi, fintech, and broader design trends, bringing fresh inspiration and best practices back to the team.

• 3+ years leading design teams—hiring, coaching, performance management, and process building.

• 6+ years of UX / product design with a portfolio that proves premium visual and interaction craft.

• Genuine curiosity about crypto/DeFi; deep domain expertise welcome but not required—our designers already bring product context.

• Proven record of operational excellence (meeting facilitation, stakeholder alignment, prioritization frameworks).

• Strong, transparent communicator who balances conviction with humility.

• Mastery of Figma and Adobe Creative Suite (or equivalents).

• Bachelor’s degree in Design, HCI, Fine Arts, or comparable real-world experience.

• Experience scaling design orgs in fast-moving start-ups or remote-first teams.

• Familiarity with motion design or brand systems in fintech / Web3.

Our hiring process

We like to be transparent and efficient. We move fast, and this process will be short and intense. We believe this process gives candidates the best experience in getting decisions quickly instead of long, drawn out interview rounds that last weeks.

Initial Screen (30 min)

This will be for us to get an understanding of your experiences and test your knowledge of Solana and DeFi. It is also an opportunity for you to learn more about the role and company.

COO Round (30min)

This will be a conversation with Isaac, who is our COO. It's a chance for you to learn about Orca's history, present status, and its bright future. He will also gauge your knowledge of AMMs and DeFi.

CPO Round (60 min each)

tmoc (Chief Product Officer) and Angela (Design) will do a deep dive on product, design and engineering perspectives.

Final Round (60 min each)

Matias (Product Manager), Tyler (Design), Brad (Design), and Raph (Product Insights) will do a deep dive on product and design perspectives.

Our stack

• Rust, Timescale, Postgres

• Next.js, Typescript, Zustand, Tailwind

• Solana's Geyser plugin, Yellowstone gRPC

• Solana smart contracts using Anchor

• Terraform, AWS ECS, Datadog, Vercel

• GitHub, Linear, Notion, Slack

About: https://orca.so/about

Twitter: https://x.com/orca_so

Discord: https://discord.orca.so

Podcast: https://orcapod.orca.so

Orca is an equal opportunity employer.