Senior/Staff Growth Product Designer

Intro

We’re looking for a Senior or Staff Product Designer to join our Product Design team at Pleo. 

Pleo is changing how companies spend. We give teams the autonomy to buy what they need, with the controls that finance teams actually trust. More than 40,000 companies across Europe rely on Pleo to handle expenses, cards, and reimbursements. And we're just getting started.

You’ll be joining with a focus on growth. Growth design at Pleo is one of the highest-leverage places to work in the company right now. We're building a self-serve motion that lets customers discover, activate, and get value from Pleo without needing a salesperson in the room. The experiences you design will be the first thing new customers encounter - and the thing that determines whether they stay.

If you're excited by the kind of design work that you can actually measure, where the loop from ship to learn is short and the impact is visible, this is the role.

Who you’ll work with

You’ll report to our Director of Product Design and sit within our cross-functional Self-serve and Onboarding business area alongside product management, engineering, data science, and content design. You'll work closely with Research and Analytics to understand what's driving or blocking activation and conversion, and work closely with Brand to make sure the self-serve experience feels unmistakably Pleo.

What you'll be doing

Growth at Pleo is about removing the distance between someone discovering Pleo and getting genuine value from it. As a Senior / Staff Product Designer, you'll own the design of our self-serve and activation experiences: the moments that determine whether a new customer gets it, commits to it, and keeps coming back.

You'll work in a highly collaborative pod alongside product, engineering, data science, and content design, moving fast and making evidence-based decisions. This isn't a role about polishing surfaces but about understanding what drives behaviour, designing experiments that test real hypotheses, and shipping work that moves the metrics that matter.

Specifically, you'll:

• Own end-to-end design for key PLG surfaces: signup flows, onboarding, in-product activation, freemium-to-paid conversion, and self-serve upgrade experiences.
• Shape the design strategy for your area, working from first principles and customer insight.
• Partner with data and research to define what success looks like, instrument your work, and close the loop on what you've shipped.
• Run and contribute to design experiments: from quick tests on friction points to larger bets on new onboarding models.
• Use Pleo's design system (Telescope) fluently and contribute patterns back to it when you spot gaps or opportunities.
• Bring content and localisation thinking into your work early. Pleo operates across multiple markets and great activation design works across all of them.
• Help raise the quality bar across the team: through critique, clear documentation, and showing what good looks like.

What you bring

You'll thrive here if you have:

• Significant experience designing in a PLG or growth context. You've worked on onboarding, activation, self-serve conversion, or freemium flows and you understand the discipline.
• A portfolio that demonstrates strong craft and measurable impact. We want to see the thinking behind the work, not just the final screens.
• Comfort operating in a highly quantitative environment. You know how to read a funnel, form a hypothesis, and design to test it.
• Experience working closely with data science, analytics, and research partners (and knowing when to lean on each).
• Strong communication skills and the ability to bring partners along on your design rationale. At Staff level, you're influencing decisions well beyond your immediate team.
• A pragmatic instinct for scope and speed. Growth teams move fast. You know how to balance fidelity with velocity.
• Comfort with ambiguity. You can define the problem as well as solve it.

You've done things like…

• Redesigned a signup or onboarding flow and shipped measurable improvements to activation or conversion rates.
• Run a structured design experiment (formed the hypothesis, designed the variants, analysed the results, and decided what to do next).
• Worked in a multi-market or multi-locale product and considered localisation as a design constraint from the start.
• Identified a structural problem in the user journey and made the case for addressing it at the right level of scope.
• Mentored other designers or contributed to how your team thinks about growth design, not just your own output.

Why this role might be a good fit for you

This role is a good fit for you if:

• You want to design the experiences that determine whether Pleo's self-serve motion actually works.
• You're energised by the intersection of customer experience and business impact. You don't see these as in tension.
• You like working with data but you don't mistake data for insight. You know when to run a test and when to make a call.
• You want autonomy with accountability. Real ownership of a product area, with the expectation that you drive it, not just contribute to it.

This role is not a good fit for you if:

• You prefer a long runway before shipping. We iterate quickly and learn from live experiments.
• You want to work in isolation. This team is deliberately cross-functional. If you'd rather minimise stakeholder contact and focus on craft alone, this isn't the right fit.
• You're not interested in the metrics side of design. Understanding funnel performance and connecting your work to outcomes is core to how the team operates.

How you'll develop in this role

In your first few months, you'll:

• Get deeply oriented in Pleo's self-serve funnel: the data, the user research, the current state of the experience, and where the biggest opportunities are.
• Partner with your PM and engineering lead to agree on a near-term focus area and start shipping.
• Establish how you work: your design process, how you run critique, how you communicate decisions.

In the medium term, you'll:

• Own a meaningful chunk of the PLG experience with increasing autonomy over strategy, not just execution.
• Build a track record of experiments: things you shipped, what you learned, and how you iterated.
• Become a go-to voice on Growth design thinking across Pleo's design org, contributing to how the team develops, not just your own projects.

At Staff level, you'll also:

• Help define how Growth design works at Pleo: the frameworks, the ways of working, the standards for what a good experiment looks like.
• Develop more junior designers on the team and invest in their growth alongside your own.

We’re committed to helping you grow, whether that means taking on larger cross-company initiatives, stepping into broader design leadership, or deepening your craft in systems, interaction, and visual design.

Please note: We can hire on a remote, hybrid, or in-person set-up in any of the locations listed on the advert, but you will need to be physically based in the country of your choice with a valid right to work. We are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role in any of the listed locations.

A quick heads-up: this role will close on April 1st.
We're keeping the application window short to ensure we can give every candidate the attention they deserve. 
So if you're even slightly tempted, don't overthink it, apply today.

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, coverage options include Vitality, Alan or Médis 
• 🌴 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  
• 👶 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

The interview process

If your application is successful, our interview process is as follows:

1. Intro call: A 30-minute chat with our Talent Partner to discuss the role, your background, and your experience with design systems.
2. HM interview: A 30-minute conversation with the Hiring Manager focused on your experience, ways of working, and how you’d partner with the team.
3. Portfolio conversation: A deep dive with a Product Designer and Engineering partner where you’ll walk us through one or two case studies, ideally including design system and/or rebrand work across desktop and mobile.
4. CPO/CTO conversation(s): Sessions with our Chief Product Officer and/or Chief Technology Officer to align on product direction, craft expectations, and how you’d contribute at a strategic level.