Senior Product Designer · Design Lead tier · Institutional Finance
Available now · globalPromoted Senior PD · Jan 2026Open to Principal / Lead / Head of DesignUS · DACH-EU · Sydney · Tokyo
Nearly five years shipping production design at an ASIC-regulated broker
—
100K+ traders, 40+ jurisdictions, $2B+ daily volume. A 150-component design system that absorbed
8 regulatory rewrites with zero rebuilds and zero design-tied compliance findings in 2+ years.
Reads the regulation before opening Figma. Ships production code, with AI in the loop and judgment
kept human. Finance is where I apply the craft now, not the limit of it — the same system
discipline carries into work well outside it.
Zero material UX-tied compliance findings across 2+ years · every
number on this page carries a source or a modelled-not-measured label — the four disclosure notes are at the
bottom of the file.
Even this portfolio is governed. Every published figure reconciles
to one canonical source of truth — 218 canonical facts, 85 pages, 0 drift — checked by a
zero-dependency verifier anyone can run: verify-facts.public.mjs. The
same “model produces, harness governs” discipline I build for AI, turned on my own work.
The reference that can't be requested: nearly 8
years of former colleagues and clients re-hiring me after they left the organisation where we first
worked together — across trading, marketing, manufacturing, and luxury real estate — with no obligation
left to give it.
Where the seat actually is: I work as the design counterpart to the operating executives — the person a chief operating officer or a managing director brings a problem to while it is still a problem, before anyone has written it down as a brief. That is why the regulatory and commercial constraints in this file arrive as design inputs rather than as review comments. One of the ten public recommendations on this site is from a managing director; the rest of the evidence for it is the work the seat produced.
Tab 01The essential read · where the file gets routed
Four roles this file credibly fits.
A senior/principal product designer who treats compliance as a product surface —
shipped at a regulated broker, not theorised in a deck — and an AI-fluent designer who ships
production code. Route the file accordingly.
01
Senior / Principal Product Designer
IC track at a trading platform, prime brokerage, or regulated fintech. At ACY: 8 regulatory
rewrites aligned across 4 product lines and 40+ jurisdictions — owning stakeholder alignment across
PM, engineering, legal and compliance without a manager translating.
Trading platformsPrime brokerageCross-functional lead
02
Design Lead / Design Manager
6 designers led, 4 hired personally across nearly five years — through hiring, attrition, solo
runs and
rebuild, validated under 8 regulatory rewrites. Alongside that, five designers across four countries produce group material without reporting to me — standard-setting across a dotted line
is most of what the senior job actually is. The scope has already been operated; the title is the part
that has not caught up yet.
6 led · 4 hired5 dotted-line · 4 countries2-week ramp
systemActive lead · 2026
03
Design System Lead
Token-first architecture, multi-platform export (CSS / JSON / Tailwind), regulatory absorption built
in at the primitive level. Proven at 150 components across 5 platforms, with a working Storybook
for engineering consumption — plus an independent 190-category
consumer design system showing the same discipline anchored to platform guidelines instead of
financial regulation.
150+ componentsToken
architectureStorybook v1.0 GA
04
Founding Design Engineer · AI-augmented
For YC-stage or AI-native fintech teams. Ships working code — React, TypeScript, Vite — alongside the
design rationale. 8 concept apps with working prototypes; Praxis Prime ships 5,288 LOC
TypeScript.
260-year auction-house brand voice translated to a digital editorial register; 8.2s → 1.4s mobile
load; 50+ global editors retained with zero retraining.
Controlled within-subjects study (n=15, paired t(14)=8.92, p<0.001): time-to-insight
4.2s → 2.5s, Cohen's d = 2.47. Full methodology disclosure with seven named limits.
◇ Concept studies · production-grounded · original IP
Seven regulatory regimes, one design system
2025 — 2026 · self-initiated · drawn from real production work, rebuilt as
independent studies under fictional brands
The same token-driven system stress-tested across adjacent regimes — FINRA 2111, SEC Reg BI, FinCEN
CDD, FATF Rec 10, SR 11-7, SEC 15c6-2 T+1, CSDR. Each ships a working artefact, not a mockup;
Praxis Prime alone ships 5,288 LOC of React/TypeScript.
2025 — 2026 · designed, branded, built and shipped solo
The institutional record proves regulatory depth; these prove 0-to-1 range — a LINE-bot
second-hand strategist with calibrated AI confidence, and a pet-services marketplace built from seven
months of Tokyo field research.
The token layer — change absorbed here
design tokens · primitives · disclosure & suitability components · propagates as configuration,
not rebuild
Trading platformStable · 0 rebuilds
Institutional FIX APIStable · 0
rebuilds
Market analyticsStable · 0 rebuilds
Web tradingStable · 0 rebuilds
Copy-tradingStable · 0 rebuilds
Same mechanism · different rulebook
The identical token-first method, pointed at a consumer regime instead of a financial one: an
independent Consumer Design System — 190 categories across 17
domains, zero dark patterns by construction, every entry anchored to Apple HIG, Material 3,
WCAG 2.2, App Store / Play policy, GDPR, COPPA or FTC rules, and served to AI agents over the same
eds-mcp server as the
institutional system. The catalogue is new in 2026, but its patterns already run in the founder’s
own live consumer products — Duo-Shou, PawsRoam
and WizAgents — so the governance discipline is not
fintech-locked.
$1M – $5M
Cost avoidance per ASIC violation
Industry benchmark per enforcement action against an AFSL holder. Two-plus years of
zero UX-tied findings is a defensible avoidance position — you cannot count the violation that never
happened, but a CFO recognises the frame.
Modelled frame · ASIC Public Enforcement Register
3 → 1.5 days
Engineering velocity per regulated screen
Halved across Q3 2022 – Q4 2023; ≈ $360K–$420K/yr of engineering capacity
returned on a 4-engineer squad at Sydney market rates — measured in Jira, not modelled.
After the disclosure-aware onboarding redesign. At a conservative $400 industry
LTV per onboarded trader, order of magnitude ≈ $700K/yr additional LTV from one design change —
the funnel delta is measured; the LTV multiplier is a modelled industry figure.
Industry baseline is one full rebuild every 18–24 months at 6–12 engineer-weeks;
eight rewrites absorbed at the token layer instead. Regulatory change became a configuration problem.
The honest aggregate: on the order of $1M–$2M USD/year of
compounded capacity returned, LTV captured and rebuild work avoided — a modelled aggregation of measured
component metrics, not a single empirically-measured ROI number. The disclosure notes below name exactly
what was measured and how.
Tab 02Track record & leadership · documented in artefacts, not adjectives
Hiring, attrition, solo runs, rebuild — the full cycle.
Cross-functional alignment as the primary job
Every rewrite ran through one weekly sync — PM (priority), Engineering (feasibility), Compliance
(interpretation), Legal (disclosure language), design absorbing all four into UI.
0 design-tied audit findings across 8 rewrites is the evidence the process worked.
PM · Eng · Legal · Compliance0 audit findings
Design ops · adoption mechanics
150 components reached 5-product-line adoption because the handoff was designed: quarterly
Figma library releases, token export as CSS/JSON/Tailwind, Storybook as source of truth, one change
channel. Design ops as a deliverable, not an afterthought.
Token multi-exportStorybook v1.0 GA
Editorial restraint at the org level
The system survived because design said no — to one-off compliance treatments, feature-specific
styles, bespoke disclosure layouts. Every change propagated through tokens. That discipline only exists
when design has the authority to refuse.
Token-first refusalSystem grammar guard
Hiring, onboarding, team-cycle management
4 designers hired personally, each productive within a two-week ramp via the self-service
enablement system (Storybook + token reference + regulatory routing playbook). Two have since moved to
Australian SaaS companies and one left to found a company; the fourth joined in May 2026, completed the
ramp, and is my current direct report on the CRM side — empirically validated, not retrospectively
described.
2-week rampDirect
report · 2026
The record, 2022–2026: six designers led, four hired through the full loop; team cycles of four →
solo → four → solo → rebuilding. Where the first cohort went matters more than the fact that they
left — the three designers hired alongside me moved on to a larger consumer fintech, a Tier 1 bank
and a US SaaS company, and I am still in touch with all three. A team people leave upward is a
training ground; the four I hired afterwards reached their first independent contribution in two weeks
because that ramp was designed, not hoped for. Promoted to Senior Product Designer in January
2026 after four years operating at design-lead tier — the scope was proven first and the title
caught up; the trajectory points one level higher. Full team-cycle history at career-journey.html.
Standard-setting without line authority: beyond the direct reports, five designers across four
countries produce group material and none of them report to me — each reports to their own
regional marketing lead. Once a year all of it converges on one desk to be assembled into the annual
presentation, the demos, and the investor and audit-facing decks. That desk is mine, which is why I was
the only one who could see what the inconsistency cost: sixty hours of overtime across five days in
late 2024, finished four hours before delivery. The deck was fine. It was a system failure that a
person absorbed, and a person is not a system.
I took it to the CEO and the COO — not for headcount, for the authority to set one production
spec — and got it. Roughly half the group builds to that spec today; one regional market remains a
holdout. A mandate produced permission, not adoption: the people who did not adopt do not
report to me and are not measured on it. The full account, including what I would ask for differently — and the brand system itself, usually read as a craft
artefact when it is really a governance instrument.
Business fluency, earned in the room: as the company's sole designer I built the investor and
fundraising decks alongside the CFO and PwC — revenue forecasts, EBITDA modelling, IPO/SPAC-readiness
materials. I do not offer financial modelling as a service — but every product decision I make is
anchored in the unit economics, the forecast, and the regulatory exposure a board will question. It is
the difference between a designer who happens to work at a fintech and one who understands the business
he is designing for.
↳ still Tab 02 · the 2026 operating model, disclosed not hidden
AI carries the volume. Judgment stays human.
An "Ed Agent" plus nine specialist agents ingest and triage across scaffolding,
documentation, and codebase recon — regulatory interpretation, naming the problem, and every sign-off
stay human. Runs on-prem when the data is the company's; the open-source eds-mcp server cuts
AI-token spend on UI build by ~85–90%. Full breakdown of what's delegated vs. kept human, the nine-agent
roster, and the on-prem architecture is on the
About page — full AI-authorship disclosure on
Praxis Prime.
Tab 03Logistics & verification · the practical page
Where, when, and how fast.
Availability
Available now · Senior / Principal PD, Design Lead, Head of Design · IC or
player-coach · Open to relocation for the right role; visa-sponsorship conversations welcome.
Markets
US East & West Coast · EU DACH / UK / Benelux · Australia
Sydney · Japan Tokyo
Time zones
Interviews run in US East afternoon · EU morning · JST business hours
Response
ed@edwson.com · replies within one business day · EN / 中文 · Japanese in progress, business in English
Institutional finance · US
Jane StreetCitadelTwo
SigmaMillenniumAQRPoint72J.P.
MorganGoldman SachsMorgan
StanleyBlackRockBloomberg
Wealth & regulated fintech · EU
UBSPictetJulius
BaerVontobelLombard
OdierSchrodersRevolutWiseN26Trade
RepublicDeutsche Bank
Australia note — ASIC-native, not ASIC-adjacent: nearly five years of production design from
inside an ASIC-regulated AFSL holder. Building under ASIC RG 268, the Product
Intervention Order leverage caps and Corporations Act disclosure obligations means near-zero regulatory
ramp-up for an ASX / Macquarie / Pepperstone / CommBank / IRESS desk. The Australian retail-protection
regime is lived experience, not a learning curve. Open to senior and principal roles across the
Australian market.
European wealth-management note: Switzerland-based reviewers are a consistent presence in 2026
traffic data. The Xanthos and
Aureus studies are deliberately framed against the FINRA 2111 /
SEC Reg BI / MiFID II fiduciary spine — directly applicable to UBS–Pictet–Julius Baer workflows.
↳ still Tab 03 · verification, check the file before forwarding it
Found first. Sourced fully. Disclosed completely.
Recruiters and AI search engines find this work without an introduction — and every
quantitative claim carries either an externally citable source or a named internal instrument (GA4 ·
Jira · Hotjar · New Relic). Where a number can't survive scrutiny, it is labelled modelled or removed.
"Institutional Finance Design System"
#1 on Google — above Figma's Nubank case study, Backbase and UXDA.
"Senior Product Designer · Institutional Finance"
#1, above LinkedIn profiles — the exact query a recruiter types.
Google AI Overview · Yahoo Japan
AI answer engines cite the ACY platform directly; in the Tokyo market the first page resolves almost
entirely to this work. Live snapshots, June 2026 — a moment, not a permanent ranking claim.
Frameworks designed around in production:MiFID II Art. 27 · RTS 27/28ASIC RG 227 · 268 ·
PDS/TMDFCA COBSFINRA 2111FinCEN
CDDFATF Rec 10 · 12SEC 17a-4SR
11-7BCBS 239SOC 2 CC6ISO 27001
A.9
Recommended 30-minute reading order for a hiring decision: post-launch first,
methodology second, then accessibility, then political-skill. The four notes are the honesty register the
rest of the portfolio leans on.
The regulation is already read. The system is already built. Let's talk.
If your team needs a designer who can walk into a compliance review, a product
sprint, and an engineering standup in the same day — and add signal to each one — the fastest route is
email.