Product Designer

Job description

About us We're building Animates — an AI companion app where design is the product. Not a chatbot. Not a waifu app. A companion who remembers what you told them three weeks ago, notices you're off before you say so, and is still there on your laptop when you close your phone. They have a face. They look at you when you speak. They react in real time — the tilt of the head, the pause before an answer, the thing that crosses their expression when a sentence lands. We're building an actual relationship — memory, emotional intelligence, presence — across every screen a person owns. All of it rests on one thing: our own animation model, running locally on-device. This isn't a promise — it's already out in the world. Our companions shipped inside xAI's Grok app, and we demoed live on hardware at CES 2026 with Razer. The team behind it built MSQRD (100M+ users, acquired by Facebook) and Loóna (Apple Design Award), with an on-device model built by ex-Meta engineers. The role You own the entire design scope of the product. Not screens — the experience. Onboarding, character selection and profiles, the relationship progression system, gamification, re-engagement, monetisation flows, and the design system that holds it all together. Most of it is still greenfield. - How a person uses it. Day 1, day 7, day 90. The first time they meet their companion, and the thousandth. - How different people use it. A 19-year-old in Osaka and a 25-year-old in Texas won't use this the same way. Cohorts, funnels, retention — you read them and you act on them. - How the product speaks. Notifications, empty states, paywalls, the moment it says nothing at all. Every surface is the character talking. - Across every platform. Mobile first, then macOS/Windows, then web — one unified feature set. Systems thinking isn't a nice-to-have here; it's the job. How we work You'll work closely with the product team day to day — that's where most of your communication lives: shaping direction, pressure-testing ideas, deciding what ships. And you'll sit side by side with engineers to get implementation right. Voice and animation have dedicated owners; everything else in the product experience is yours to shape. You - 5+ years in product design — consumer, mobile-first, cross-platform, with a portfolio that proves it. - You've shipped products people opened every day — real audiences, real metrics, real consequences. - You make the call, and you own the outcome. You don't wait for permission to fix what's broken. - A feel for global consumer culture and where trends move — you follow what resonates across markets and audiences, and you're genuinely curious to go deeper into ours. We build for the US, Japan, and Korea, and a designer who only reads Western taste will miss half the room. Fluency in anime, gaming, or fandom aesthetics is a real plus, but the non-negotiable is the instinct to notice cultural nuance and the willingness to immerse. - You'd rather ship three rough versions than polish one in isolation. - You use AI tools daily and still think for yourself. - Working English (B1+). Plus Russian, Ukrainian, or Belarusian — that's how the team talks internally today. Don't apply if you need a PM to hand you a spec, or six weeks before you're comfortable showing a screen. What we offer - Remote across Europe, Warsaw hub — coworking covered wherever you are. - 29 days of paid leave. - Care bonus to spend on benefits that matter to you. - Any hardware you want — latest MacBook or whatever does the job. - A small team that has done this before, and a product with no precedent to copy. - Your first design in front of real users within a month of joining. Hiring process 1. Intro call with HR — who you are, what you're looking for, how we work. 2. Short call with the team — a deeper look at your experience and past work. 3. Live whiteboard session — one real problem, one hour, thinking out loud side by side. No take-home, no unpaid homework, ever. To apply Pick two screens from any app: companion, game, social: 1. One that you think is emotionally well designed. 2. One you think is manipulative. Then, in one paragraph: what’s the difference? Not in intent — in the actual design decisions. What did one do that the other didn’t? Don’t write more than a paragraph on each. Send it over, and we'll take it from there. By submitting your application, you acknowledge that you have thoroughly reviewed and consented to our Data Privacy Notice for Candidates. https://animation-inc.notion.site/Data-Privacy-Notice-for-Candidates-1c40e866154180938e41fc7093ffd944?pvs=73