Freelance Product Designer (Fractional)

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.