Senior Product Designer

Job description

ROLE & RESPONSIBILITIES: WHAT YOU WILL DO We’re hiring a Senior Product Designer to shape how merchants experience billing and finance. This role sits at the center of the Polar product, ideal for someone who combines real craft with the systems thinking to design for a technical, high-stakes domain, and the appetite to own surfaces end-to-end. Polar is the financial substrate for modern startups, designed to make billing, payments and unit economics a breeze to manage and understand. That means the product is dense: usage meters, customer data, pricing models, cost insights, revenue reporting, checkout, taxes. Our job is to make that legible without making it simplistic. You won't be decorating a dashboard. You'll be deciding what a merchant needs to understand about their business and crafting the interface that tells them. We believe that design is not a vision on a Figma canvas. Design at Polar is what’s actually shipped in production. It spans the entire stack. Great developer ergonomics, docs that respect your time, dashboards that make usage billing legible & checkouts your customers trust. You'll be the second designer at Polar, working alongside our founding designer. That means real scope from day one and no design bureaucracy to navigate. It also gives you the opportunity to shape the design function at Polar across the board. Own product surfaces end-to-end - Take full responsibility for entire areas of the product, from problem framing through to shipped pixels. You'll work directly with engineers in the codebase and be accountable for how the thing actually feels in production. Design for a complex, technical domain - Turn billing concepts, usage-based pricing, per-customer margin, subscription state, payout timing, into interfaces that merchants trust. This means getting deep enough in the domain to have opinions about the systems themselves, not just its presentation. Extend the design system - Contribute to and evolve our design system: tokens, primitives, and the billing-domain components (money display, usage meters, pricing configuration) that make our product feel coherent. You'll help decide what belongs in the system and what stays local. Raise the craft bar across the company - Set the standard for what "finished" means at Polar. Review work, push on details others would let slide, and make the case for quality in a room full of engineers who move fast. YOUR FIRST 90 DAYS Days 1–30: Use it, then understand it Integrate Polar into a real project. Set up a product, take a payment, read the docs, feel the friction firsthand. Get into the support queue and the merchant conversations. Learn the design system and the codebase well enough to ship a small change on your own. Form a clear picture of where the product is weakest before proposing what to build. Days 31–60: Own a surface Take end-to-end ownership of a significant product area and ship meaningful improvements to it. Work directly with engineering to get changes into production. Start identifying the structural problems, the patterns we've repeated inconsistently, the flows that never got designed, the concepts we've never explained well and make the case for fixing them. Days 61–90: Set direction Operate with high autonomy on the areas you own. Bring a point of view on where the product should go, not just how it should look. Contribute back to the design system, and start shaping how design works at Polar as the team grows. WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR Operating Mindset - Taste you can defend – You have strong opinions about interface quality and can articulate why, without hiding behind "it just feels better." - Subtraction over addition – Your instinct when a surface gets complicated is to remove, not to add another affordance. You're comfortable saying no to features on aesthetic and clarity grounds. - You ship – You measure yourself by what's live, not by what's in your file. You'd rather get something in front of merchants and iterate than perfect it in isolation. - Clear writer – You can make an argument in text: a product rationale, a spec, a critique. Most of our decisions happen in writing. - High ownership – Comfortable operating without a design manager, a design process, or someone else deciding what matters this week. Domain Skills - Exceptional craft in the fundamentals. Typography, layout, hierarchy, motion. Our aesthetic is dark, monochromatic, and precise, with almost no decoration to hide behind. - Systems thinking. You design components and patterns, not screens, and you understand how a token layer and a component library actually get maintained. - Comfortable in code. You don't need to be an engineer, but you should be able to read React and TypeScript, run the project locally, and make front-end changes yourself. - Fluency with data-dense interfaces: tables, charts, configuration, state. You've designed something genuinely complicated before. Experience - 8+ years designing digital products, with significant time on a developer-facing, fintech, or infrastructure product. - A portfolio that shows depth on complex product surfaces — not just marketing sites and mobile onboarding flows. - Demonstrated ownership of a design system, or substantial contributions to one. - (Bonus) You've shipped your own front-end code to production. - (Bonus) Experience with payments, billing, or subscription infrastructure. - (Bonus) You've worked in a small, fast-moving team where the playbook didn't exist yet.