Freelance Product Designer (Fractional)

About the Role

This is a fractional Product Designer role embedded directly with the founding team of an early-stage AI-powered talent marketplace, working across the full product surface — from candidate-facing AI conversations to hiring manager dashboards. You'll be the design voice in the room, shipping real product quickly without layers or design-by-committee. The work directly shapes how people discover and land new career opportunities.

What You'll Do

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

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

• Build and evolve the company's design system from the ground up.

• Run lightweight user research — candidate and company interviews, session observation, and friction identification.

• Produce developer-ready handoffs including specs, redlines, and asset exports, collaborating closely with engineering on implementation fidelity.

• Shape product direction alongside the founding team, contributing beyond pixels to strategy and priorities.

• Manage fractional engagement logistics: communicate weekly availability, track capacity, and handle billing expectations clearly.

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 both product design and design system work.

• A strong portfolio demonstrating taste, clarity, and shipped work — not just aesthetics, but solved user problems.

• Experience designing end-to-end flows for multi-stakeholder products (e.g. candidates, companies, internal teams).

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

• Comfort conducting user research and translating findings into product improvements.

• Proven ability to work autonomously, async, and in distributed teams with minimal direction.

• Prior fractional or contract design experience with concurrent client management.

• Familiarity with accessibility standards (WCAG) and inclusive design is a plus.

• Experience with AI-powered products, conversational interfaces, or marketplace/multi-sided platform design is a strong plus.

• Background in HR tech, recruiting, or talent marketplace products is a plus.

Compensation & Benefits

Compensation range: $100,000 – $120,000 USD annually. Flexible fractional engagement with fully remote work. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

Fully remote — open to candidates worldwide.