About the role
We’re looking for seasoned Product Design Directors to join our leadership team and help us scale design impact across Pleo. In this role, you’ll lead product design for a major area of our business - shaping strategy, elevating craft, and driving outcomes through exceptional, human-centered design.
Great experience is at the heart of that mission. Not just how things look, but how they work. How they guide, bring clarity, empower, and delight. That’s where you come in.
You’ll work closely with executive leadership, partner deeply across disciplines, and grow a team of thoughtful designers who care about doing great work together. This is a strategic and hands-on role for a design leader who thrives in complexity, moves with clarity, and believes that simplicity is earned.
What you will be doing
You’ll own and drive design transformation in a critical product area, delivering high-quality experiences that help our customers thrive - and our business grow. At the same time, you’ll shape how we build, collaborate, and scale as a design team.
In the first 6 months, we imagine you will:
- Define a clear design strategy for your area and align it with partners in Product and Engineering
- Ship 1-2 major initiatives with the team with early signs of impact on adoption, monetisation, or UX quality
- Create clarity, support, and growth opportunities for your team
- Ensure design is actively shaping roadmap and prioritisation - not just reacting to it
- Coach designers to raise their craft, confidence, and ownership.
By 12 months, you’ll likely:
- Lead design work that moves key business metrics - revenue, retention, or product engagement
- Build and scale a UX quality strategy for your area, measuring impact and adjusting as you learn more
- Mentor designers to take on bigger problems and grow their scope of impact
- Co-lead a cross-functional initiative that shapes how Pleo prioritises, collaborates, or ships value
- Deepen trusted partnerships across Product, Engineering, Brand, and beyond
Who you’ll be working with and reporting to
You’ll report to our VP of Design and work closely with senior leaders across Product, Engineering, and Brand. You’ll directly manage a team of 5–10 product designers, including Staff-level ICs, and collaborate with other Design Directors to shape the future of our practice.
We’re a tight-knit design org that values deep thinking, clear storytelling, and building with care. We show up for each other, we ship with intent, and we believe that great design is a team sport where everyone is owning their part.
How you’ll develop in this role
As a Design Director at Pleo, you’ll:
- Step into a strategic partner role for our most important product bets
- Mentor designers and emerging leaders as they grow their confidence and scope
- Influence how we scale our design team, evolve our processes, and raise the bar for quality
- Help shape a culture of clarity, ownership, and craft - where designers do their best work
We’re committed to helping you grow - whether that means stepping into executive leadership, refining your strengths as a product design operator, or taking on new and complex challenges as Pleo scales.
Why join us?
Working at Pleo means you're working on something very exciting: the future of work. Our mission is to help every company go beyond the books. Pleo itself means ‘more than you’d expect’, and it’s been the secret to our success over the last 8 years. So it’s only fitting that we’d pass this philosophy onto our customers to help them make the most of their finances.
We think company spending should be delegated to all employees and teams, that it should be as automated as possible, and that it should drive a culture of responsible spending. Finance teams shouldn’t be siloed from the rest of the organisation – they should work in unity with marketing, sales, IT and everyone else.
Speaking of working in unity, our values tell the story of how we work at Pleo. We have four core values, the first of which is ‘champion the customer’, which means we address real pain points that businesses face. Next up is ‘succeed as a team’, which highlights how our strength lies in our diversity and trust in each other. We also ‘make it happen’ by taking bold decisions and following through to deliver results. Last but not least, we ‘build to scale’, creating lasting solutions that address today’s challenges and anticipate tomorrow’s needs.
So, in a nutshell, that's Pleo. Today we are a 850+ team, from over 100 nations, sitting in our Copenhagen HQ, London, Stockholm, Berlin, Madrid, Montreal and Lisbon offices —and quite a few full-time remotes in 35 other countries! Being HQ'd out of Copenhagen means we're inspired by things like a good work-life balance. If you don't work in the office with us, we'll help you set up the best remote setup possible and make sure you still have time to connect with your team.
Show me the benefits!
- Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending!)
- Lunch is on us for your work days - enjoy catered meals or receive a lunch allowance based on your local office 🍜
- Comprehensive private healthcare - depending on your location
- We offer 25 days of holiday + your public holidays
- For our Team, we offer both hybrid and fully remote working options
- Option to purchase 5 additional days of holiday through a salary sacrifice
- We use MyndUp to give our employees access to free mental health and well-being support with great success so far ❤️🩹
- Access to LinkedIn Learning - acquire new skills, stay abreast of industry trends and fuel your personal and professional development continuously
- Paid parental leave - we want to make sure that we're supportive of families and help you feel that you don't have to compromise your family due to work 👶
What you bring
- A track record of leading design work that made a measurable difference - whether by launching completely new experiences, redesigning major parts of the product, or changing how teams work
- Experience managing senior and staff designers, and have real stories of coaching them into confident leads and future design leaders
- A reputation for building high-performing teams - where people feel clear, trusted, and energised
- Strong instincts for working with product and engineering. Not just making things look good, but shaping what gets built and why
- A habit of grounding decisions in real customer insight through numbers, stories, patterns, or pain points
- Experience getting senior stakeholders on board with complex ideas - especially when the right path isn’t the obvious one
- A sharp eye for quality and a mindset for raising the bar - especially when things get fast, messy, or ambiguous
Extra bonus points if
- You’ve built tools in and around fintech - how money moves, how teams make decisions, how businesses stay compliant - and you care deeply about making that work simpler, clearer, and more human
- You’ve led design in multi-market or multi-language products, and understand what truly scales across cultures
- You have curiosity and hands-on experience with emerging tech like AI, and a drive to use it in ways that make products more powerful and human
