About the Role
This is a fractional Product Designer role at an early-stage AI-powered talent marketplace startup, working directly alongside founders and engineering to shape the entire product experience. You'll be the design voice in the room — owning everything from candidate-facing AI conversations to hiring manager dashboards — with real ownership and no design-by-committee.
What You'll Do
- Own the full design surface: product UI, candidate experiences, company dashboards, and the AI interaction layer.
- Turn ambiguous, early-stage problems into clean, intuitive user flows while maintaining a high bar for craft.
- Build and evolve the design system from the ground up.
- Run lightweight user research — candidate and company interviews, session observation, and friction identification.
- Produce developer-ready handoffs including specs, redlines, and asset exports, collaborating closely with engineering on implementation fidelity.
- Shape product direction alongside the founding team, contributing input beyond pixels.
What We're Looking For
- 5+ years designing digital products, with meaningful time at a startup as the primary or sole designer.
- Deep fluency in Figma for product design and design system work.
- A portfolio demonstrating taste, clarity, and thoughtfulness — with shipped work.
- Experience designing end-to-end flows and interaction models for multi-stakeholder products.
- Experience building or evolving design systems from an early stage.
- Comfort conducting lightweight user research including interviews and session observation.
- Ability to work autonomously, async, and with minimal direction in a distributed team.
- Prior fractional, contract, or multi-client design experience, including managing availability, capacity, and billing logistics.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills for presenting and documenting design decisions.
- Familiarity with accessibility principles (WCAG) and inclusive design is a plus.
- Experience designing for marketplaces, platforms, or multi-sided networks is a plus.
- Experience designing AI-powered products or conversational interfaces is a plus.
- Background in HR tech, recruiting, or talent marketplace products is a plus.
Compensation & Benefits
Competitive compensation in the range of $100,000–$120,000 USD annually. Flexible fractional engagement with remote work. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
Fully remote — open to candidates worldwide.