# Freelance Product Designer \(Fractional\) - Company: [Clera]() - Location: San Francisco - Team: Engineering - Employment type: Full Time - Salary: $100K – $120K - Posted: September 9, 2026 ## Job description ### About the Role This is a fractional Product Designer role at a pre-seed AI-powered talent marketplace startup, working directly with the founding team and engineering to shape and ship a product that reimagines how candidates and companies connect. You will be the design voice in the room, owning the full design surface with real autonomy and meaningful impact. ### What You'll Do * Own the entire design surface across product UI, candidate-facing experiences, company dashboards, and an AI conversational interaction layer. * Turn ambiguous, early-stage problems into clean, intuitive flows while maintaining a high bar for craft. * Build and evolve a design system from the ground up as the product scales. * Run lightweight user research by conducting interviews, observing sessions, and identifying friction points with both candidates and companies. * Collaborate directly with founders and engineers to ship product quickly, with no layers or design-by-committee. * Contribute to product direction beyond pixels, offering input on strategy and experience alongside the founding team. ### What We're Looking For * 5 or more years designing digital products, with meaningful time as a primary or sole designer at a startup. * Deep fluency in Figma for product design and design system work. * A portfolio demonstrating taste, clarity, and thoughtfulness, with shipped work across end-to-end flows. * Experience designing for multi-stakeholder products (candidates, companies, internal teams). * Experience building design systems from scratch or at an early stage. * Ability to conduct lightweight user research including interviews, session observation, and friction identification. * Comfort working autonomously, asynchronously, and with minimal direction in a distributed team. * Bonus: experience designing marketplaces, platforms, or multi-sided networks. * Bonus: experience designing AI-powered products or conversational interfaces. * Bonus: background in recruiting, HR tech, or talent marketplace products. ### Compensation & Benefits * **Rate:** $100,000 to $120,000 USD annually (fractional/contract engagement) * **Visa sponsorship:** Not available ### Location Fully remote, open to candidates worldwide. ## Apply [Apply on Clera]() Canonical job page: