UX Designer (Hybrid)

About Rewards Network 

For 41 years, Rewards Network has been helping restaurants grow revenue, increase traffic, and boost customer engagement through innovative financial, marketing services, and premier dining rewards programs. By offering unique card-linked offers, we introduce diners to fantastic restaurant experiences, leveraging advanced technology and data analytics to deliver value to restaurants, diners, and our strategic partners' loyalty programs. 

Our Culture  

At Rewards Network, you'll be part of a driven and diverse team that excels in collaboration, issue resolution, and taking ownership of both personal growth and the company's success. We take pride in partnering with the world's most powerful loyalty programs to drive full-price paying customers to local restaurants through marketing services and flexible funding options. Our engaging and rewarding environment is designed to help you gain your full potential. 

Job Overview

The UX Designer owns end-to-end design across the experiences connecting our 25M+ dining members with 20,000+ partner restaurants, plus the merchant tools restaurants use to connect. Translates member behavior, merchant needs, and partner brand standards into intuitive, accessible experiences across consumer and merchant websites and apps.

This is a hands-on IC role for a Figma-fluent designer who uses AI to move faster without losing craft, and has strong opinions on consumer loyalty and B2B SaaS product experience. This designer is our first dedicated UX hire (so an ownership mindset is a must) and will stand up the design system, processes, and standards we rely on going forward – working lean by building on established design-system foundations rather than bespoke work wherever possible.

This is a hybrid position and requires in-office presence Tuesday through Thursday each week in Chicago.

• Own UX end-to-end for complex consumer and merchant products — discovery through dev handoff and post-launch iteration.
• Partner with Product and Engineering on both a near-term roadmap and a long-term strategic vision, balancing user needs with business, technical, and compliance constraints.
• Plan and run user research — discovery, usability tests, concept tests — and iterate from telemetry and qualitative feedback.
• Translate business goals and user insights into flows, IA, and interaction patterns.
• Own and evolve the design system across consumer and merchant surfaces; building a design-system framework and reserving customer design for genuinely new or distinctive features; raise the quality bar across design, research, and content while streamlining process.
• Present design work, methodology, and value to executive leadership and cross-functional partners; secure buy-in for solution direction.
• Collaborate with Engineering through build and design QA; align in-product experience with Marketing/Lifecycle and partner brand standards.
• Mentor peers, set elevated standards for design quality, and drive knowledge sharing across the org.
• Design to WCAG 2.1 AA by default; fluent in Figma.

• Product instincts and user empathy.
• AI-assisted design fluency; clear on where AI helps and where it doesn’t.
• User-centered design: research, usability testing, heuristic evaluation, journey mapping, prototyping.
• Visual craft: typography, color, layout, hierarchy, motion.
• WCAG 2.1 AA in practice.
• Agile delivery tools: JIRA, Confluence, FigJam/Miro, Maze/UserTesting.
• Can present and defend design decisions to leadership and partners.
• Bachelor's in Design, HCI, Visual Design, or related field-or equivalent experience 
• 3-5 years of UX/product design shipping consumer or B2B SaaS products across native (iOS/Android) and web platforms.
• Designed within external partner brand standards (airline, hotel, retail, financial loyalty/membership, or similar) where guidelines aren't yours to set.
• Significantly contributed to or owned a design system at scale using Figma. 

 Education, Certifications and Experience: Preferred

• Experience designing Loyalty, rewards, AI, gamification, or habit-forming products.
• Industry experience with B2B SaaS, restaurant, dining, hospitality, or partnerships-driven businesses. 
• Experimentation programs (A/B testing) and behavioral data informing design. 
• Front-end fundamentals (HTML, CSS, basic JS; familiarity with React/Reactive Native a plus) sufficient to collaborate with engineers.
• AI tools (Figma AI, generative image, LLM-based design/content) used in a real product workflow.

What you’ll love about us: 

Comprehensive benefits package, which includes:

• This is a full-time, exempt position and the base compensation for this opening in Chicago is expected to be $110,000-$120,000 annualized, depending on level, candidate experience, skills, and other factors. This position will be eligible for an annual bonus program with a 10% bonus target for total at target of $121,000-$132,000.
• Competitive Paid Time Off and company holidays
• Generous dining reimbursement when you dine with our restaurant clients 
• 401(k) plan with a company match
• Two medical plan options- Standard PPO or High Deductible Health Plan (HSA with company match for HDHP participants)
• Partnership with Rx n Go, offering certain prescriptions for free
• Two dental plan options and a vision plan
• Flexible Spending Accounts and a pre-tax commuter benefit program
• Accident, Critical Illness, and Hospital Indemnity Insurance Plans
• Short Term and Long Term disability 
• Company-paid life insurance and AD&D insurance, supplemental employee, spouse, and child life insurance 
• Employee Life Assistance Program
• Hybrid working space in our state of the art office downtown located by the Metra and Ogilvie train stations
• Catered lunches provided on Tuesday's in our Chicago office