Fractional Founding Designer

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

About the Role

This is a fractional founding design role (10-20 hours per week) at an early-stage AI recruiting platform in the HR tech space. You would be the first designer, owning the look, feel, and quality standards of the product from the ground up rather than executing tickets handed down from others.

What You'll Do

• Define and establish the visual and interaction design language for the product.

• Build and maintain a design system and documentation that engineers and future designers can build against.

• Create high-fidelity mockups and prototypes for key product surfaces.

• Collaborate directly with engineering and product to implement designs and navigate technical constraints.

• Conduct user research, usability testing, and gather qualitative feedback to continuously iterate on designs.

• Make product strategy and design decisions confidently with limited information, refining based on real user input.

• Support design-to-code handoff, with awareness of frontend implementation realities.

What We're Looking For

• 3 or more years of experience as a product designer shipping consumer or B2B products end-to-end.

• Demonstrated experience establishing design systems, standards, and documentation for teams.

• Proficiency in Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD for high-fidelity mockups and prototypes.

• A portfolio that is publicly accessible and shows a clear problem-solving approach, ideally with before/after context.

• Comfort operating autonomously in ambiguous, early-stage environments.

• Experience working in early-stage startups or in fractional and part-time design capacities is a strong plus.

• Familiarity with HTML and CSS for smoother engineering handoff is a plus.

Location

Fully remote. Open to candidates based in the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland).