Lead Product Designer
Arca · New York City
About Arca
Arca is a wealth management firm built from the ground up with AI. Most people get financial advice that's reactive: an annual check-in, a plan that's a document instead of a living thing, a relationship where you're one of three hundred clients your advisor is trying to remember. We think that's backwards. The kind of service that used to require a team of specialists behind you, the kind that makes you feel like the only person in the room, should be available to far more than the ultra-wealthy.
So we're building it. We're not SaaS — we are the wealth management business, rebuilding it from the inside with AI. Our platform is an Iron Man suit for advisors: it takes over the low-leverage work so they can focus on what actually requires a human, showing up with empathy, context, and judgment. Underneath, it keeps a living understanding of each client. It remembers the thing you mentioned once, six months ago. It notices when your life changes — a new job, a new kid, a market shift — and adjusts before you think to ask. You won't see the technology. You'll just notice your advisor seems to know you better than any financial professional ever has.
That's the product we're growing: client by client, on the strength of the experience itself. We started by acquiring firms managing over $1B in client assets, which gave us real advisors, real clients, and real financial outcomes to build against from day one. But acquisition was the starting line. The bet is that an advisor backed by this platform delivers something good enough that clients come to us on their own.
It's a $20T market, and we think it's ready to be rebuilt.
— Rron, CEO
The receipts
Stage: Series A, $64M raised
Backed by: General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Venrock
Board & Advisors: Former CEO of Vanguard, Former CFO of Schwab, Founder of Altruist, Morgan Housel (author of The Psychology of Money)
The team
We’re small on purpose and engineering heavy: about 80% of the team is technical. We’re based in NYC and hail from high growth startups like Stripe, Ramp, Rippling, Plaid, Doordash, & Glean.
We’re fully in-office in Flatiron, five days a week—lunch together, coffee breaks, basketball games, happy hours.
The role
As a Member of Technical Staff focused on Product Design, you'll set the vision and the look and feel of Arca from the ground up. You'll work directly with our founder and the engineering team across both sides of the product: the platform advisors work in every day, and the experience clients use to understand and manage their wealth. This is a hands-on role: you'll design, prototype, and ship, not direct from a distance. The patterns you set become the foundation every designer after you builds on. If you design it, you own it.
What you'll design (and own)
The client experience. Where clients see their full financial picture, engage with their advisor, and act on their own terms. We've never built directly for consumers until now, so you define what the experience even is, from the first touchpoint through ongoing wealth management.
Advisor surfaces. The platform advisors use every day to serve clients, built so one advisor can deliver high-touch service to far more clients than they could before.
Agentic experiences. How people work alongside agents that draft, decide, and act, including when to bring a human in and how to build trust in what the agent did.
Generative UI. Design patterns for interfaces that agents put together on the fly, and the system that keeps them coherent and predictable.
Design principles, visual language, and system. So the product feels like one thing as it grows across every firm we bring on.
Research that keeps the work honest. You sit with advisors and clients, watch where they hesitate, and bring what you learn straight back into the product.
The design function. Hiring, rituals, and craft standards as we add product and brand designers.
Example problems you'd work on
These aren't hypothetical; we're actively working on versions of all of these.
Reviewing days of agent work without reading every step. An agent has spent three days moving a client's account transfer forward: chasing paperwork, answering emails, updating the plan. The advisor needs to review, edit, and approve that work in minutes, with confidence they didn't miss the one decision that mattered. How do you show the shape of the work, not just the log of it?
Trust in a product where an agent touches a client's money. When an agent drafts a rebalance or moves cash, the advisor and the client both need to understand what happened and why. Getting the balance right between transparency and noise is what lets us hand agents more responsibility over time.
A complex financial picture that feels calm, not like a dashboard. Accounts, taxes, estate plans, and goals, shown in a way that feels personal and clear. Most of the industry looks like beige PDFs and dense tables; the bar here is that a client feels understood, not overwhelmed.
A design system for UI that's generated, not drawn. When agents assemble screens dynamically, rendering scenarios and adjusting visualizations mid-conversation, you can't design every state by hand. You'll define the components, rules, and constraints that keep generated UI on-brand and predictable, so an advisor is never surprised by their own screen.
The kind of person who thrives here
You're excited by ownership, ambiguity, and building things that matter.
You set direction; you don't wait for it. You're comfortable leading through ambiguity and making calls with incomplete information, and you'd rather put a point of view on the table than wait for a spec.
You're a hands-on maker with real craft. You have senior or staff-level product design experience and a portfolio that shows exceptional, polished work. You iterate fast and still hold a high bar.
You've built from zero. You've done 0→1 product work at a startup and shipped fast. Experience at both early- and later-stage companies is a plus.
You're consumer-minded. You've designed consumer products, or consumer-focused B2B products held to the same bar. You come from design-forward companies (think Linear, Mercury, Stripe, Ramp, or Notion), or your trajectory shows the same standard. Fintech experience is a plus.
You're AI-pilled and technical enough to build. You use AI tools in your own work every day, have real opinions on what agents make possible, and are comfortable prototyping in code and talking to engineers in their language. Having designed for agents specifically is a plus.
You ground your work in users. You understand user research and know the difference between what people ask for and what they actually need. This is people's real money and their plans for their families; you design for trust, not just attention.
You're someone people actually want to be in the room with. This is a small, tight-knit team in one office, five days a week, working on problems that don't have clean answers. The people who thrive here want to argue about interaction patterns at lunch and then prototype something together in the afternoon. Kind, direct, and low-ego, you can give candid feedback without being an asshole, and you're genuinely energized by this environment (not just tolerant of it).
Why now is the moment to join
This is a narrow window with unusually high leverage.
We just came out of stealth, and we're growing fast. The team is intentionally small, the equity reflects that, and the ceiling is high. You'd be joining early enough that the work you do now directly shapes what the company becomes and what's possible next.
The advisor-facing product is being defined right now, by a small team that talks to advisors every day. We've just brought on our second firm—the real inflection point, where we start separating what generalizes from what was bespoke. The patterns you set become the foundation for every acquisition that follows.
The consumer product is a blank page. We've never built directly for consumers until now—no legacy, no template. Whoever takes this on defines what the experience even is.
The hard part is behind us, which means the interesting part is starting. The platform is live, the concept is proven, advisors have moved real client assets onto it. The work now is scaling a working system across four or five acquisitions this year—workflows, data, agents, reliability under real load.