Freelance Product Designer (Fractional)
Job description
About the Role
This is a fractional, fully remote Product Designer role at an early-stage AI-powered talent marketplace startup. You will serve as the design voice working directly alongside the founding team and engineering, shaping everything from candidate-facing AI conversations to hiring manager dashboards. The work matters because great design here directly affects how people find their next career opportunity.
What You'll Do
Own the entire design surface, including product UI, candidate-facing experiences, company dashboards, and the AI interaction layer.
Turn ambiguous product problems into clean, intuitive flows and ship real product quickly with minimal layers.
Build and evolve the design system from the ground up as the product scales.
Run lightweight user research by conducting candidate and company interviews, observing sessions, and identifying points of friction.
Contribute to product direction alongside the founding team, going beyond execution to influence strategy.
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 that demonstrates taste, clarity, and thoughtfulness through shipped, current product design work.
Experience designing end-to-end user flows and interaction models for multi-stakeholder products.
Experience building and evolving design systems from scratch or at an early stage.
Proven ability to conduct lightweight user research including interviews and session observation.
Comfortable working autonomously with minimal direction and communicating async across a distributed team.
Experience designing for marketplaces, platforms, or multi-sided networks is a strong plus.
Experience designing AI-powered products or conversational interfaces is a strong plus.
Background in recruiting, HR tech, or talent marketplace products is a bonus.
Compensation & Benefits
Compensation is $100,000 to $120,000 USD annually on a fractional freelance or contractor basis. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
Fully remote, open to candidates worldwide.