Senior Product Designer

Job description

**Own the problems, not the tickets.** Senior design roles often quietly shrink into review-and-approve: polish someone else's direction, unblock the team, keep the system tidy. This one is the opposite. You'll own hard product areas end-to-end, shape how a problem is framed before anyone opens a canvas, and set the craft bar the rest of the team designs to. Design here is a stakeholder in what gets built, not a service that makes it look good afterward. Getting there takes craft all the way down: the transitions, the states most teams never design for, the edge cases that ship right instead of looking broken. As a senior designer here, your work becomes the reference point for what good looks like, and you help every designer around you get there faster. **Transform Education Through Design** We help schools increase their fundraising efficiency and keep their alumni communities active. As one of India's few profitable, bootstrapped SaaS companies, we're building lasting value for our team, customers, and the educational institutions we serve. **Our Impact:** - 6 million alumni connected - 500,000 students impacted - $10M+ in donations raised - 54 million engagement opportunities created - Profitable and bootstrapped since day one. # **The Role** You'll join our 25-person product team (product, design, engineering, and quality)as the senior craft voice on a five-person design team, working alongside the design lead and three product designers. You'll design for multiple audiences with distinct needs: advancement professionals, alumni, students, and administrators. Each brings a different level of technical comfort and an emotional relationship with their institution. The workflows are genuinely complex (fundraising campaigns, event management, alumni communities, data-heavy admin tools), and the bar is to make them feel simple. Design at Almabase is a key stakeholder, not a service function. You'll shape how problems are framed before a single screen is drawn, push back with evidence, and own the direction of the product areas you work on. **Why we're hiring senior now** - **Complex product areas that need an owner**: Permissions, integrations, and data-heavy workflows where the design decisions shape the product's direction, not just its surface. - **We want to raise the bar with a senior systems thinker:** Someone who sees how flows, the product, the business, and the design system connect, and whose judgment lifts the whole team's work, not just their own. - **A real accessibility remit:** Our customers include publicly funded US universities, and we back WCAG AA and VPATs contractually, so making accessibility a default in our system is genuine, resume-worthy work you'll help own. **What You'll Own** **End-to-End Product Design** - Own the complete design process, from problem framing to shipped product, for key product areas - Take concepts to working prototypes in days using AI tooling, and validate with real users and data - Set the craft benchmark: interaction, visual, and motion quality that others reference without being asked. **Systems Thinking and Design System** - Bring a systems lens to your work: how flows, data, the product, and the design system connect, so what you ship scales instead of adding one-offcomplexity - Steward and evolve our design system (components, patterns, tokens, docs) as the layer that keeps designers, engineers, and AI tools all producing consistent output - Make accessibility a built-in property of the system, with WCAG AA as the baseline **Team Leverage** - Raise the bar for the designers around you through pairing, critique, andproblem-framing sessions (craft leadership, not people management; no direct reports) - Build and share the AI workflows, prompts, and practices that make the whole team faster **Cross-Functional Influence** - Partner with PMs and engineers to define problems, not just solve them; bring user evidence into roadmap conversations - Drive alignment through clear written artifacts, so decisions move fast and stay made **We're Looking For Someone Who** Frames problems before drawing boxes You interrogate the stated problem before designing. When someone says a flow is broken or unintuitive, your first move is to find out what's actually causing it and what success looks like. Thrives in complexity without creating it B2B products involve intricate workflows, but that doesn't mean they need to feel complicated. You find elegant solutions hidden inside seemingly chaotic requirements. Has taste they can articulate You don't just know what's better; you can explain why, in terms a PM or engineer can act on. Your quality bar is visible in your work and contagious in your team. Builds, not just draws Working prototypes are your default way to think and communicate. You'recomfortable using AI tools (Claude, Cursor, v0, or similar) to go from idea to something clickable fast, and you keep the judgment that separates good output from plausible output. Multiplies the people around them You've made other designers better through critique, pairing, and example. You get energy from raising a team's ceiling, not just your own. **You'll Be a Great Fit If You** - **Want ownership, not tickets:** You're looking for a seat at the table where design shapes direction - **Obsess over details:** You sweat colors, typography, states, and edge cases, and you ship them right - **Iterate relentlessly:** The first version is a starting point; you keep improving based on what you learn - **Love the full lifecycle:** Discovery, framing, building, shipping, and measuring what happened after - **Treat AI as a daily collaborator:** It's already part of how you explore, prototype, and polish **This Role Is NOT For You If** - You prefer pure strategy over hands-on craft; this role ships work, constantly - You need designs handed off and never revisited; we iterate in the open, with engineers **Required Experience & Skills** **Experience**: 3 to 5 years or more designing software products, including end-to-end ownership of a product area at a B2B or SaaS company. We're looking for at least 3 years; beyond that, if your path doesn't match exactly but you can do this job, we'd still like to hear from you. **Core capabilities:** **Product judgment:** A track record of shaping what got built, not just how it looked, with evidence you can walk us through **Systems thinking:** You see how the product, engineering, business, and the design system connect, and design for the whole, not just the screen in front of you **Design systems:** Experience working with, and evolving, an established design system **Visual and interaction craft:** Polished, considered work across states, edge cases, and responsive contexts **Accessibility:** You treat accessibility as part of quality, and you're ready to help make WCAG AA a default in our system **AI fluency:** You integrate AI tools and code-assisted workflows into your own practice, and you can help others adopt them **Communication:** You articulate design decisions clearly in writing and in rooms, and you're comfortable disagreeing with evidence **Good to have:** - Deep accessibility experience: WCAG audits, remediation, or VPAT /compliance documentation - Frontend familiarity (HTML/CSS or working in a real codebase with AI assistance) - Experience mentoring or leveling up other designers **Success Metrics** **You'll know you're successful when:** - **Your product areas are measurably better:** adoption, task success, and support volume move because of decisions you made - **The design system is healthier than you found it:** better coverage, fewer inconsistencies, accessibility built in by default - **The team is visibly faster and better:** designers around you produce stronger work because of how you pair, critique, and share what you know. **Why Almabase?** - **Real ownership:** Design shapes direction here. You'll frame problems, challenge assumptions, and own outcomes, not execute tickets - **AI-forward by culture, not mandate:** The team already works with AI tools daily(design, prototyping, research synthesis), and we invest in staying at the edge. You'll have room to tinker and the expectation to share what works - **Mission-driven impact:** Your design work directly enables educational institutions to better serve students and create opportunities - **Sustainable business:** Profitable and bootstrapped, focused on long-term value creation, with the stability that comes with it - **Professional growth:** A real leveling rubric, honest quarterly feedback, and a manager invested in your next orbit **Ready to Apply?** We'd love to see your work and understand your thinking. Please share: 1. **Portfolio** with 1-2 case studies of complex B2B or workflow-heavy products: the problem, the constraints, the decisions and iterations, and what shipped. A grid of final screens won't tell us enough. 2. **Anything you've built:** live prototypes, shipped AI-assisted work, or side projects that show how you think and build. 3. **Your answers to a few short questions in the application.** They're the same for everyone, so we can review fairly and fast, and they tell us how you think **The Interview Process** We keep it to a few focused rounds, usually two to three weeks end to end 1. **Intro conversation:** to get to know each other and check for fit. 2. **Portfolio and experience deep-dive**, where you walk us through your thinking on real work: the problems, the decisions, the trade-offs. 3. **A collaborative design exercise,** where we work through a real problem together so you can see how we think and we can see how you do. 4. **A conversation with our Head of Product and Design**, more of a motivation and values chat. If you're in Bangalore, you'll also meet the wider product and engineering team in person. **What to expect in the first year** **Within the first month** - Deep-dive into the product, customers, and the problems each audience is trying to solve - Take on design work from your first week to learn our processes from the inside - Meet everyone: designers, PMs, engineers, and customer-facing teams - Agree on your first product area and priorities with your manager **Within 3 months** - Work you've designed is in production, and you've watched real users interact with it - You've taken ownership of your first product area and the design system'shealth metrics - You're an active voice in critiques, and designers are seeking out your feedback **Within 6 months** - You own design direction for your product areas, grounded in research and data you helped gather - The design system shows your fingerprints: better patterns, better docs, accessibility improving measurably - You've shipped AI workflows or practices the rest of the team has adopted **Within 12 months** - Your areas are the craft benchmark others reference - You've mentored designers in ways they'd name in their own growth stories - You're trusted by PMs and engineers across squads, and your judgment carries weight in planning **Work timings** - **Your day runs on India time.** The large majority of your work, and your collaboration with the product and engineering team, happens during regular IST hours. - **Occasional evenings, only for customers.** Our customers are mostly in the US, so if you're running a research or feedback call with them, it will fall later in the day (roughly 4 PM to 2 AM IST). Those are occasional and scheduled, not your default hours. - **Flexible on where you work.** The team is based in Bangalore, but we don'tneed everyone in the office every day; it varies by team, and we'reincreasingly async in how we work.