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.