UX Manager, Equity

Job Summary

UX Manager to build and lead a dedicated user experience function within the Certent Equity Management (CEM) product organization. This is a foundational hire — the role is responsible for standing up UX as a discipline across the equity platform, establishing design standards, building a team of UX researchers and UI designers, and embedding user-centered design practices into the product development lifecycle.

The UX Manager will partner closely with Product Management, Engineering, and Professional Services to drive measurable improvements in usability, workflow efficiency, and participant experience across a complex financial services SaaS platform.

• Team Building & Leadership
  • Build and lead the CEM UX function from the ground up; hiring and managing a team of UX researchers and UI designers as the function scales
  • Define team structure, roles, and operating model that balances dedicated research and design capacity across multiple concurrent work streams (admin, financial reporting, ESPP, broker, batch processing, and platform modernization)
  • Establish workflows and collaboration processes between UX research and UI design to ensure insights flow directly into design decisions
  • Foster a UX culture rooted in evidence-based design, rapid iteration, and close partnership with product and engineering
  • Mentor and develop UX researchers and UI designers individually; setting clear expectations for quality, velocity, and stakeholder engagement
• Design System & Standards
  • Create and maintain a unified design system and component library for the CEM platform, ensuring visual and interaction consistency across modules
  • Direct UI designers in defining and evolving design patterns, guidelines, and reusable components that account for the complexity of equity compensation workflows, including dense data entry, multi-step transactions, regulatory disclosures, and financial reporting outputs
  • Establish accessibility standards appropriate for an enterprise financial services application
• Research & Discovery
  • Stand up a rigorous UX research practice, including usability testing, heuristic evaluations, task analysis, and customer interviews
  • Direct UX researchers in planning and executing generative and evaluative research across all CEM product domains
  • Partner with Product Management to integrate user research into discovery, prioritization, and validation cycles
  • Build and maintain empathy maps, journey maps, and persona frameworks specific to CEM's core user segments — equity administrators, finance teams, participants, and broker partners
• Product Collaboration & Execution
  • Embed the UX team into the product development lifecycle, contributing research insights and design input from early discovery through delivery and post-release iteration
  • Allocate UX research and UI design capacity across product domains, ensuring coverage is aligned with roadmap priorities and strategic initiatives
  • Partner with Product Managers to translate PRDs and functional requirements into wireframes, prototypes, and final UI specifications
  • Collaborate with Engineering to ensure design intent is preserved through implementation, participating in sprint reviews and QA walkthroughs
  • Support the Next Gen platform modernization initiative by establishing the UX vision and interaction patterns for the next-generation architecture
• Stakeholder & Customer Engagement
  • Present UX strategy, research findings, and design direction to product leadership and cross-functional stakeholders
  • Coordinate customer advisory sessions, onsite visits, and feedback reviews to ground design decisions in real-world workflows
  • Partner with Professional Services to understand implementation pain points and identify UX-driven solutions that reduce onboarding friction and support burden

• 7+ years of UX experience spanning research and design, with at least 2 years in a management or team lead capacity overseeing both disciplines
• Demonstrated experience building or significantly scaling a UX function — including hiring and managing both UX researchers and UI designers — within a B2B SaaS product organization
• Strong portfolio or body of work…