Freelance Product Designer (Fractional)

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.