Design Program Manager, Research Operations

Details

Who We Are

About Stripe

Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Millions of companies—from the world’s largest enterprises to the most ambitious startups—use Stripe to accept payments, grow their revenue, and accelerate new business opportunities. Stripe’s mission is to increase the GDP of the internet.

About the Team

Stripe’s Design organization builds product and brand experiences for businesses and developers. It includes product designers, content designers, design researchers, design systems engineers, motion designers, and design program specialists.

The Design Operations team leads Design’s business operations, runs cross-organizational programs, and builds systems that help teams collaborate and produce high-quality work. Design Program Managers guide complex programs through the design lifecycle and apply design thinking to the operating model.

This full-time role partners with the Research team and reports to the Head of Design Operations.

Responsibilities

• Lead and build programs for the Research organization, including processes and resources that support impactful research and scale the use of user insights across Stripe.
• Improve operating models and processes by automating tasks, improving workflows, developing repeatable methodologies, and measuring the impact of these changes.
• Prepare researchers to use agentic workflows, including designing, building, and overseeing autonomous, multi-agent workflows.
• Build custom tools, agents, automations, and skills for Research workflows and responsibilities.
• Evaluate and implement new tools with researchers and cross-functional partners to support new capabilities across Stripe.
• Work with researchers and designers across disciplines, skills, backgrounds, and specialties to identify patterns and scale successful tools and approaches.
• Partner with Research leadership and Design Operations to balance competing priorities, use team resources effectively, identify obstacles and risks, and develop solutions.
• Source and evaluate third-party vendors and work with Legal, Security, and Procurement to onboard and pay vendors, including managing statements of work, business terms, and budgets.

Requirements

• Understanding of research work and direct experience in Design, or the ability to quickly learn the workflows, deliverables, tools, and pressures relevant to Stripe researchers.
• Hands-on experience building artificial intelligence (AI) agents, automations, and tools that changed how work gets done.
• Effective coaching and communication skills, with the ability to adapt approaches to different audiences and help people adopt new ways of working.
• Systems thinking and the ability to identify patterns and scale solutions beyond an individual user.
• Persistence, versatility, and a bias toward action and speed.
• 5+ years of experience in design thinking, qualitative or quantitative research, user experience, or program management, including experience partnering with research teams.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience building AI-powered tools, agents, automations, or workflows that improved processes for designers, researchers, creative teams, or product teams.
• Experience coaching, teaching, or enabling others, with evidence of changes in how people work.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences.
• Experience managing multiple workstreams and relationships across product, marketing, support, and design teams.
• A product-builder mindset focused on turning standalone AI experiments into polished, production-ready products.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with research and design tools such as Qualtrics, Sprig, Figma, Dovetail, or design system management tools.
• Experience with AI development tools and platforms such as Claude, Claude Code, Codex, custom agent frameworks, application programming interface (API) integrations, or workflow automation tools.
• Experience with change management, organizational transformation, or large-scale enablement programs.
• Experience building and scaling internal tools, templates, or playbooks adopted beyond an immediate team.