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.