For hire · Lead UX / Staff Product Designer

Hire a designer who ships the version that survives.

Vinoth Kumar Manickam — Lead UX / Staff Product Designer. A decade plus shipping enterprise software, fintech, and AI products. $840K/yr saved, ~$1M/yr in fraud prevented, 2M+ investors served. Full-time, fractional, or scoped.

10+
Years designing
40+
Designers mentored
$1.8M/yr
Annual impact shipped
AA+
Accessibility shipped at scale
How to hire me

Four ways we can work together.

Full-time Lead UX / Staff Product Designer

Open to Lead, Staff, and Senior product design roles at companies shipping enterprise software, fintech, or AI products. Remote-first across US time zones.

  • Enterprise SaaS
  • Fintech & payments
  • AI platforms
  • Developer tools

Fractional design leadership

8–20 hours per week as the senior design voice in your org. Strategy, hiring, mentoring, and shipping alongside the team. 3–6 month engagements.

  • 3–6 month engagements
  • Weekly working sessions
  • Hiring & mentoring
  • Cross-functional review

Scoped consulting engagements

Short, outcome-driven projects with a clear deliverable: AI surface design, design system stand-up, UX audit of a critical flow, or end-to-end design for one product area.

  • 2–8 week sprints
  • AI / ML interface design
  • Design system bootstrapping
  • UX audits

Portfolio reviews & IC coaching

1:1 coaching for mid-level designers moving into Senior, Staff, and Lead roles. Portfolio teardown, interview prep, narrative coaching, IC career planning.

  • Single sessions or packages
  • Resume & portfolio review
  • Behavioral interview prep
  • IC track planning
Where I add the most value

Enterprise. Fintech. AI.

Enterprise product design

Multi-stakeholder workflows, role-based access, governance and audit surfaces — turned into tools people actually open. MUSE at Fannie Mae, fleet management at Esper, Jira/Confluence at Atlassian.

Fintech product design

Payments, investing, retirement, developer-facing fintech APIs. Vanguard retirement & advice for 2M+ investors; PayPal Developer Portal with AI-powered authorization tooling.

AI product design

Conversational AI in 6 languages, model-governance UX, confidence and lineage displays, human-in-the-loop review patterns. The Systemic Design Method is my framework for AI inside regulated organizations.

Hiring FAQ

Questions before we talk.

What kind of work do you take on as a UX designer for hire?

I take on senior and lead UX engagements in enterprise software, fintech, and AI/ML products — full-time roles, fractional design leadership, and short scoped consulting engagements (audits, design system bootstrapping, AI surface design). I'm based in Austin, TX and work remote across US time zones.

Are you available for contract or fractional UX design work?

Yes. I take on a small number of contract and fractional UX engagements per year, typically 8–20 hours per week alongside a primary role. Common engagements: design audits, AI surface design, design system stand-up, hiring manager support, and senior portfolio reviews.

What does a senior UX designer portfolio look like?

A senior UX designer portfolio leads with strategy, not screens. It shows how you frame ambiguous problems, lead cross-functional partners, navigate stakeholders, and ship measurable outcomes inside real product constraints. Visual craft matters, but the story is about judgment — why this trade-off, why this scope, why this metric.

What does a principal UX designer portfolio look like?

A principal UX designer portfolio shows org-level impact: design systems adopted across products, frameworks others reuse, programs that change how the company ships. Mine includes the Systemic Design Method — a framework for designing AI inside regulated organizations — alongside case studies where I led design across multiple product surfaces.

Have a product worth shipping right?

Tell me the team, the product, the problem. I reply within a business day with whether it's a fit and what working together looks like.

vinothm856@gmail.com