Lead UX Designer
Design lead across connected surfaces. Sets direction, mentors 1–4 designers, owns the relationship with product and engineering leadership.
About — Lead UX / Staff Product Designer
I design for the org chart and the model, not just the screen.
Vinoth Kumar Manickam — Lead UX / Staff Product Designer. A decade plus owning design on enterprise software, fintech infrastructure, and AI products. Currently Lead UX at Fannie Mae. Open to Lead, Staff, and Senior product design roles.
Austin, TXCT · UTC−6Remote · USUS work-authorized · sponsorship needed
I lead design on regulated, multi-stakeholder products. The arc — InMobi (2015) → Cropin → Atlassian → Esper → Vanguard → PayPal → Fannie Mae — has all been the same job under different skins: turn dense, governed systems into tools real humans want to open. I work end-to-end: framing, research, IA, interaction, system, prototype, ship.
My job is to kill the wrong screens early. I refuse to design until policy and accountability are named, encode the rule once in the system instead of re-litigating it screen by screen, and stage AI confidence, lineage, and override paths for the moment of decision.
I write about AI in regulated organizations under a framework I call the Systemic Design Method, and I mentor 40+ mid-level designers moving into Senior, Staff, and Lead roles in AI and fintech.
Outside the work: runner, espresso obsessive, slow but determined HCI reader.
Levels I'm open to
Lead UX. Staff Product Designer. Principal IC.
Staff Product Designer
Owns a critical product area end-to-end. Defines the bar for craft and decision-making across multiple pods. Senior IC, not management.
Principal Product Designer
Org-level impact: frameworks, systems, AI patterns, and programs that change how the company ships. Top IC track.