Freelance Product Designer (Fractional)

About the Role

This is a fractional Product Designer role at a pre-seed AI recruiting startup, working directly with the founding team and engineering to shape 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 ownership and no design-by-committee layers.

What You'll Do

Own end-to-end design across the product: candidate-facing experiences, company dashboards, and the AI conversation layer.

Turn ambiguous problems into clean, intuitive flows while maintaining a high level of craft and shipping quickly alongside engineering.

Build and evolve the design system from the ground up as the product grows.

Run lightweight user research by conducting interviews, watching sessions, and identifying points of friction for both candidates and hiring managers.

Shape product direction alongside the founding team, contributing input that goes well beyond pixels.

What We're Looking For

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

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

A portfolio that demonstrates taste, clarity, and thoughtfulness, with shipped product work.

Experience designing end-to-end user flows and interaction models for multi-stakeholder products.

Proven ability to build and evolve design systems from scratch or early stage.

Hands-on experience with lightweight user research: interviews, session observation, and friction identification.

Ability to work autonomously with minimal direction, communicating async in distributed teams.

A startup or product-focused background rather than a primarily enterprise or large-agency track record.

Nice to have: experience in HR tech, recruiting, or talent marketplace products.

Nice to have: experience designing AI-powered products or conversational interfaces.

Nice to have: experience designing for marketplaces or multi-sided platforms.

Compensation & Benefits

Compensation range is $100,000 to $120,000 USD annually. The arrangement is fractional and flexible. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

Fully remote, open to candidates worldwide.