Job Description

About Ceno

Ceno is building the neobank for the US-to-Asia corridor: one account where Americans invest in global equities, hold and move USD, KRW, and JPY, and run a financial life that spans two continents.

We're starting with the hardest and most valuable piece: a retail brokerage that gives US investors direct access to Korean and Japanese equities. USD in, USD out, with FX, custody, KYC, and tax reporting handled invisibly by an AI-native, agentic back end. Recent regulatory changes in Korea opened direct market access to overseas brokers for the first time, and we intend to turn that opening into the default way America invests in Asia.

The product promise is true localization: buying any global equity feels exactly like trading the US markets, with the research, filings, and news that local investors trade on translated and delivered in real time by our AI research engine. From there the map expands, market by market, until global equities sit on one shelf, with stablecoin-enabled settlement moving money across the Pacific in minutes instead of days. The AAPI community is our beachhead; US retail is the market.

We're seed-stage, on a multi-phase path to our own FINRA-licensed broker-dealer, and building the founding team now. There is no design team yet. You are it.

Why this role exists

A brokerage is its interface. In a category no one has seen before, buying a Korean or Japanese stock, the design is the product: it is what makes an unfamiliar, intimidating action feel as ordinary as buying Apple. Robinhood proved that design can create a category; Coinbase proved that design is what earns trust when people move real money into something they don't fully understand. Ceno needs both, and it needs them from the first screen.

This is a founding-team seat with full ownership of product design end to end: the mobile app, the onboarding and funding flows, the trading and research surfaces, the design system, and the brand as it shows up in the product. You are the first designer, so you both set the vision and push the pixels. You'll partner directly with the CEO on what we build, with the CTO and engineers on how it ships, and with the growth team on how it converts. Three things define the first 12 months.

• Onboarding to a funded account. Design the flow that turns a curious download into a KYC-verified, funded, trading account. This is the number the company lives on, and it runs straight through your screens: sign-up, identity, funding, first trade.
• Making the foreign feel native. Design a trading and research experience where a Korean or Japanese equity, its price, its filings, its news, its currency, feels as legible and safe as a US stock. This is the core product bet, and it is fundamentally a design problem.
• The system and the bar. Establish Ceno's design language and component system from zero, and set a quality bar high enough that a regulated financial product feels trustworthy and a consumer product feels delightful, at the same time.

What you will own

• End-to-end product design. Own the full mobile app experience across iOS and Android, from information architecture to interaction detail to final polish. You design flows, screens, states, and motion, and you see them through to what actually ships.
• Onboarding, KYC, and funding. Design the highest-stakes flows in the product: account creation, identity verification, bank linking and funding, and first trade. Reduce every point of friction and drop-off, because funded accounts are how the business is measured.
• Trading and research surfaces. Design how users browse, evaluate, and trade Korean and Japanese equities: search and discovery, the equity detail page, order entry and confirmation, portfolio and positions, and the AI research and news feed that makes foreign markets legible.
• Design system and craft. Build Ceno's first design system, typography, color, components, iconography, motion, so the product scales consistently and engineers can move fast. Own the craft bar for the whole product.
• Trust and clarity in a regulated product. Design disclosures, risk messaging, fees, FX rates, and confirmations so they are clear and compliant without feeling like fine print. Work with US counsel so what ships stay within FINRA/SEC rules.
• Cross-cultural and bilingual UX. Design for a product that presents Korean and Japanese content to a US audience: bilingual data, translated filings, localized formatting, and a first launch aimed at Korean-American and Japanese-American investors.
• Brand in the product. Partner with growth to make sure the brand people meet in a TikTok or an ad is the brand they meet in the app. Contribute to marketing surfaces, the App Store presence, and launch moments.
• Research and iteration. Run lightweight user research and usability testing, watch the funnel and session analytics, and iterate. Prototype fast, ship, learn, repeat.
• Team build-out. Set the design vision and hiring bar, then hire the next 1 to 2 designers as we scale from the AAPI-first launch to broader US retail.

Who we are looking for

Must-have

• 8 to 10+ years in product design, with strong consumer mobile experience. You've owned features end to end, from problem to shipped pixels, on a product real people use every day.
• A portfolio you can walk us through: complex consumer flows you designed, the decisions you made, and the outcomes. We care more about how you think than how many screens you can show.
• Excellent craft. Your interaction design, typography, layout, and attention to state and detail are genuinely high, and you hold that bar under real shipping pressure.
• You've built or meaningfully extended a design system, and you're fluent in the tools (Figma) and in prototyping to communicate intent.
• You collaborate tightly with engineers and ship. You understand technical constraints, spec cleanly, and get your designs into production faithfully.
• Founder mentality: you set your own direction, move fast, hold quality high, and don't need a PM or a brief to know what to work on.

Strong nice-to-have

• Fintech, brokerage, banking, crypto, or investing product experience. You've designed for money, trust, and regulated surfaces before.
• Korean and/or Japanese language ability, or deep familiarity with Korean-American / Japanese-American communities, and comfort designing bilingual, cross-cultural UX.
• Experience designing a product in a brand-new category, where there's no established pattern to borrow.
• Brand and visual identity range: you can move between product UI and brand expression.
• Comfort designing within financial marketing and disclosure rules, or a fast learner happy to pick them up.

Not the right fit

• Designers who need a full brief, a PM, and a research team to get started. The first 12 months are hands-on and scrappy.
• Pure visual or brand designers who've never owned shipped product flows, or pure UX generalists whose craft bar isn't high. This role needs both.
• Candidates who lead with “I want to manage a design team.” The first year is heavy individual-contributor work; the team comes after.

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