Candidate file ED-CHEN · SPD-2026 · For recruiters & hiring managers · 90-second triage below
Ed Chen — Senior Product Designer
On file · 2026

Ed Chen

Senior Product Designer · Design Lead tier · Institutional Finance

Available now · global Promoted Senior PD · Jan 2026 Open to Principal / Lead / Head of Design US · 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.

~5 yrs
Finance UX in production
ASIC AFSL 403863 · 2022–present
100K+
Live traders served
$2B+ daily volume · 40+ jurisdictions
150+
Component system · 5 platforms
Ships as an MCP server for AI agents
8 → 0
Regulatory rewrites → rebuilds
MiFID II · RG 268 · FCA COBS · FINRA
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.

React · TS · ViteAI-augmented workflowProduction-grade code

↳ still Tab 01 · shipped, labelled, sourced

Production first. Concepts labelled. Never conflated.

Each case study has a named client, a regulatory anchor, and a measured outcome — working surfaces, not slides.

● Shipped · Flagship · ASIC AFSL 403863

ACY Securities — design system architecture

2022 — present · APAC / EU / MENA · 100K+ traders · $2B+ daily volume

  • KYC drop-off 73% → 45% on the 47-field flow — GA4 funnel, Q2 → Q3 2022
  • Order flow 8.2s → 2.9s post-redesign — moderated lab study, n=15
  • Regulatory rewrite cost 3–4 weeks → 3–5 days per event
  • Zero material UX-tied compliance findings across 2+ years
2022 — 26

● Shipped · Solo full-stack · UHNW tier

Christie's International Real Estate — editorial platform

2021 · 9 months · sole product owner, designer & developer · $5M–$80M audience

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.

2021

● Shipped · Measured with named statistics

Finlogix — market analytics, data-density redesign

2022 · 8 jurisdictions · 40+ markets

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.

2022

◇ 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 — 26

● Live · 0-to-1 · founder-built · Japan market

Solo consumer products — Duo-Shou · PawsRoam

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.

2025 — 26
Independent contracts · designed & coded solo · 2016 – 2020
IBM GDC 2019 LA Auto Show Sourcing at MAGIC Eudora Definch

↳ still Tab 01 · the mechanism, and what it compounds into

Eight rewrites hit the token layer. Five surfaces never moved.

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.
Measured · ACY Jira velocity · n = 30 consecutive sprints
27% → 55%
KYC funnel completion, doubled
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.
Measured delta · GA4 funnel Q2 → Q3 2022 · LTV modelled
≈ 48 – 96 wks
Engineer-weeks of rebuild work avoided
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.
Order-of-magnitude · ACY engineering retros 2022–2026

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 · Sydney · ASIC-native

MacquarieASXPepperstoneIRESSCommSecCMC MarketsIG MarketsStakeAMPVanguard AUAirwallex

Japan · Tokyo · AI-native

NomuraDaiwaMUFGSBIRakuten SecMoney ForwardMercariPayPayAnthropicHebbiaRogo

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/TMD FCA COBSFINRA 2111FinCEN CDD FATF Rec 10 · 12SEC 17a-4SR 11-7 BCBS 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.

日本語For Japanese hiring teams

採用担当者の方へ — 機関投資家向け金融とAIに強いプロダクトデザイナー

Ed Chen(エド・チェン)です。ASIC 規制下の証券会社 ACY Securities(AFSL 403863)で、10万人超のトレーダー・40 以上の法域・1日 20 億ドル超の取引基盤のトレーディング/KYC/コンプライアンス画面を設計してきました。150 コンポーネントのデザインシステムは、MiFID II・ASIC RG 268・FCA COBS・FINRA など 8 回の規制改定を作り直しなしで吸収し、UX 起因の重大なコンプライアンス指摘はゼロです。2026 年 1 月にシニアプロダクトデザイナーへ昇格しました。

現在の強みは AI ネイティブなデザインオペレーションです。自作のオーケストレーター「Ed Agent」と 9 体の専門エージェント(Claude Code・Codex・Antigravity・Figma MCP)で、要件の取り込みから分析・工数トリアージまでを高速化しつつ、設計判断とサインオフは人間が担保します。データ残留が要件のときはオンプレミス(DGX Spark / EXO)で完結。コードも自分で書く、AI に流暢なデザイナーです。

東京・日本市場で積極的に機会を探しています(リモート可・移住も検討、就労ビザのご相談も歓迎)。シニア/プリンシパル/デザインリード/デザインエンジニアのポジション、特に金融・トレーディング・規制対応・AI ネイティブなフィンテックのチームを希望します。業務言語は英語です。日本語は独学で毎日継続中(208日連続)ですが、現時点で業務に耐えるレベルではありません。書類・面談は英語でお願いしております。その代わり面談は JST の営業時間に合わせます。英語を業務言語とするチーム、または設計レビューを英語で回せる環境を想定しています。

想定する応募先は、証券・金融機関(野村證券・大和証券・三菱UFJ(MUFG)・SBI 証券・楽天証券・マネックス)、フィンテック(マネーフォワード・PayPay・メルカリ・楽天)、および東京の AI スタートアップです。機関投資家向け金融・規制対応 UX の実務経験を、東京の金融 DX・Web3・AI プロダクトに直接持ち込めます。ご連絡は ed@edwson.com へ(1 営業日以内に返信)。本ページ本文と各プロジェクトは英語です。日本語レベルは上記のとおりで、誇張はしていません。

Close the fileOr open a conversation

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.

Actively monitored · replies within one business day · interviews across US East afternoon / EU morning / JST business hours