Senior UX Designer

Job Description

About Us

MarketAxess is on a journey to digitally transform one of the world’s largest financial markets, enabling the shift from analog, phone-based trading to a fully electronic marketplace. Why does this matter? Because our platform makes trading fixed-income more accessible, ultimately improving transparency, efficiency, and competition in the marketplace. Changing the way an established industry transacts is no easy feat. There will be twists and turns, because no one’s ever done this before. But now, more than 2,000 clients around the world rely on our solutions, and that number is only expected to grow in the years ahead. We know where we’re going. How we get there is up to us. Join us and help Take Us There.

About the Role

MarketAxess is undertaking a multi-year transformation of our desktop trading platform, as part of this transformation, customer experience plays a critical role in ensuring our products ship with clarity, coherence and adoption readiness; not just polished screens.

We are seeking a Senior UX/UI Designer to join our UX Design Team, with expertise in designing trading platforms and a deep understanding of financial markets. The ideal candidate is comfortable working alongside Product and Engineering during active build phases, while also contributing to the evolution of future workflows and broader platform experiences. You have a strong ability to quickly translate complex workflows into clear, high-quality, buildable solutions, while identifying opportunities to improve and scale the experience over time.

You should be passioate about solving UX challenges, leveraging industry best practices, and a user-centered approach. You enjoy designing dense, data-rich environments, including complex data grids and real-time trading workflows, with minimal whitespace and dark theme. You will be designing complex data grids, trade workflows, and data visualizations in an innovative way that helps create seamless user experiences.

This role is embedded within Product and Engineering teams and is responsible for innovating and defining the customer experience, ensuring UX readiness ahead of development, reducing ambiguity for engineers, and maintaining end-to-end workflow integrity as features move from discovery through launch. This is a hands-on, delivery-oriented role operating in a fast-moving, AI driven, highly collaborative environment.

How You’ll Help Take Us There

• Build workflows that match how users think and work:Through close collaboration with clients and internal stakeholders, you’ll ensure our products align with how traders think and work; ensuring each workflow aligns with user intent, reducing friction, clarifying next steps, and delivering intuitive, scalable, workflow-driven experiences that support real-world usage patterns.
• Design elegant solutions for complexity at scale:You’ll create high-fidelity designs/prototypes in Figma to communicate polished, production-ready concepts for our fixed income trading platform, crafting intuitive experiences across dense, data-rich interfaces that help users confidently navigate complex workflows in a fast-paced, high-stakes environment.
• Use of AI in the Design Process: The design process should incorporate AI where it can accelerate quality and speed, including early concept generation, exploration of workflow options, synthesis of feedback, prototyping and iteration on design directions. AI should be used as an enabler within the design process to help the team move faster, evaluate more possibilities, and focus effort on higher-value strategic decisions.
• Customer Experience, Research & Discovery Approach: Approach this work through a customer experience lens, considering end-to-end workflows, user goals, cross-application journeys, and adoption readiness, not just the interface. A focused discovery phase should validate assumptions and uncover user behaviors and pain points through feedback, usage signals, and iterative testing. This ensures the solution is grounded in real needs, fits naturally into the desktop ecosystem, and can move efficiently into build to deliver near-term value.
• Apply a customer experience approach supported by AI: You’ll leverage AI to accelerate concept generation, exploration, and iteration, while designing with a holistic customer experience lens—considering end-to-end workflows, cross-application journeys, and alignment to broader desktop strategy.
• Unified Desktop Strategy: Contribute to a more connected, intuitive, and scalable experience across applications. This includes alignment to shared workflows, platform consistency, and longer-term opportunities to improve the overall customer experience across the trade lifecycle.
• Collaborate to ship great products: You’ll work hand-in-hand with product, engineering, and QA to translate complex business and user needs into scalable design solutions, ensuring UX intent is clearly defined, understood and maintained from concept to release.
• Champion a user-centered, feedback-driven design process:You’ll engage directly with end users to validate design decisions, uncover usability issues, and ensure our solutions are grounded in real-world insight, conducting research, synthesizing findings, and iterating on designs to deliver truly usable, client-centered experiences.
• Advance our design system:You’ll set high standards for design excellence and consistencyby evolving our internal multi-theme design system in Figma, ensuring reusable patterns, visual consistency, and developer-ready handoff for both dark and light modes.
• Ensure workflows are ready for build: You’ll define workflows, states, transitions, and edge cases before work enters development, helping teams move faster with fewer mid-sprint clarifications and less rework.
• Support go‑ to‑ market and adoption readiness: Contribute to workflow-based demos, help teams explain the experience clearly to clients, and support launch readiness by identifying adoption risks and ensuring solutions align with real-world usage.
• Advance UX maturity & evolve workflows: Drive UX maturity across the organization by refining processes, facilitating workshops, contributing to documentation, and advocating for design. At the same time, identify patterns, gaps, and opportunities to continuously improve workflows—helping to create a more consistent, scalable, and intuitive user experience over time.

What We’re Looking For

• 7+ years of UX design in enterprise software environments
• 3+ years designing fixed income or trading applications
• Experience with desktop applications and desktop interoperability frameworks (e.g., OpenFin, Interop.io, Electron, FDC3)
• Expert-level proficiency in Figma for prototyping and design system contribution
• Ability to leverage generative AI tools to accelerate wireframe creation, explore design variations, and validate concepts through rapid prototyping
• Proficiency in utilizing AI for user researchto uncover behavioral patterns, predict user needs, and identify friction points; informing evidence-based design decisions
• Experience applying AI-driven accessibility and quality checks to audit and validate UI designs against established standards, ensuring inclusive and compliant user experiences
• Strong understanding of prompting AIto generate and maintain design documentation, specifications, and component guidelines to ensure consistency, accuracy, and scalability across the design system
• Designing with complex data grids and dense UI components
• Familiarity with multi-theme, scalable design systems across multiple products
• Excellent communication, facilitation, and stakeholder engagement skills
• Comfortable operating in fast-paced, ambiguous environments with high complexity
• Strong ability to define workflows, gather cross-functional requirements, and communicate design decisions effectively
• Proven experience working with Product and Engineering teams during active delivery (e.g., sprint cycles, refinement, QA review), not just pre‑build design
• Experience mentoring and supporting junior designers

What You Can Expect from Us

• Hybrid Environment: Our employees enjoy a mix of working in the office and from home
• Free Food: We provide free lunch for employees when they are working in the office. Plus, our offices are stocked with snacks
• Paid Time Off: Competitive PTO package including vacation and personal days, sick leave and charity days
• Generous Parental Leave: Up to 20 weeks fully paid leave
• 401(k): Dollar-for-dollar employer match up to $17,500
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan: Employees can purchase MarketAxess common stock at a discount
• Wellness Stipend: We provide employees with up to $1K annually towards gym memberships, home office equipment and more
• Onsite Healthcare: We offer convenient access to world-class care through Mount Sinai at our Hudson Yards location
• Tuition Assistance and Professional Development: Benefit from live and on-demand learning, role-specific training, employee-led Lunch and Learns and guest speakers
• Core benefits: Highly competitive medical, dental, and vision programs

For job positions in NYC, NY, and other locations where required, the estimated salary range for a new hire into this position is $150,000 USD to $225,000 USD. Actual salary may vary depending on job-related factors, which may include knowledge, skills, experience, and location. You may also be eligible for annual cash incentives, equity, and other benefit programs.

MarketAxess Corporation and its affiliates provide equal employment opportunities to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital status, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic in the location in which the candidate is applying.

All of your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

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