Freelance Product Designer (Fractional)

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

About the Role

This is a fractional Product Designer role at a pre-seed AI-powered talent marketplace startup, working directly with the founding team and engineering to shape and ship a product that reimagines how candidates and companies connect. You will be the design voice in the room, owning the full design surface with real autonomy and meaningful impact.

What You'll Do

• Own the entire design surface across product UI, candidate-facing experiences, company dashboards, and an AI conversational interaction layer.

• Turn ambiguous, early-stage problems into clean, intuitive flows while maintaining a high bar for craft.

• Build and evolve a design system from the ground up as the product scales.

• Run lightweight user research by conducting interviews, observing sessions, and identifying friction points with both candidates and companies.

• Collaborate directly with founders and engineers to ship product quickly, with no layers or design-by-committee.

• Contribute to product direction beyond pixels, offering input on strategy and experience alongside the founding team.

What We're Looking For

• 5 or more years designing digital products, with meaningful time as a primary or sole designer at a startup.

• Deep fluency in Figma for product design and design system work.

• A portfolio demonstrating taste, clarity, and thoughtfulness, with shipped work across end-to-end flows.

• Experience designing for multi-stakeholder products (candidates, companies, internal teams).

• Experience building design systems from scratch or at an early stage.

• Ability to conduct lightweight user research including interviews, session observation, and friction identification.

• Comfort working autonomously, asynchronously, and with minimal direction in a distributed team.

• Bonus: experience designing marketplaces, platforms, or multi-sided networks.

• Bonus: experience designing AI-powered products or conversational interfaces.

• Bonus: background in recruiting, HR tech, or talent marketplace products.

Compensation & Benefits

• Rate: $100,000 to $120,000 USD annually (fractional/contract engagement)

• Visa sponsorship: Not available

Location

Fully remote, open to candidates worldwide.