UI/UX Designer (10-12 Month Maternity Cover)

Are you passionate about creating thoughtful digital experiences that make it easier for travellers to discover and book unforgettable trips? We’re hiring a UI/UX Designer to help shape the ToursByLocals traveller experience and evolve our design system. (This is a Maternity Leave Cover lasting for approximately 10-12 months depending on start date, with a possibility for extension.)

ToursByLocals is an online travel marketplace; our platform connects discerning travellers in search of customized, private tours with handpicked tour guides, providing meaningful and memorable travel experiences in over 170 countries, worldwide. We believe in keeping travel human: our global team of nearly 100 people support and engage our customers as they search for out-of-the-ordinary travel experiences. You can learn more about our hiring process here.

This is a full-time remote position, based in Canada. You must be legally able to work in Canada. We are unable to sponsor candidates at this time.  

As a UI/UX Designer at ToursByLocals, you’ll help design the flows travellers use to discover, explore, and book tours—from our homepage and search experience to tour and guide pages and the booking process. Reporting to the VP of Product, you’ll also contribute to our partner-facing tools and grow our design system to create consistent, scalable experiences across the product range.

You’ll work closely with Product Managers and Engineering to turn customer needs, business goals, and data into thoughtful designs that can be built, tested, measured, and optimized. If you’re excited about combining customer empathy, strong design craft, and experimentation to create a best-in-class global marketplace, apply below!

Your primary goal will be to create intuitive, high-performing experiences that help travellers discover and book the right tour. Here’s how you’ll do that:

• Design pages and components across the traveller side of the ToursByLocals marketplace, including search, tour and guide pages, and the booking experience.
• Continuously optimize existing experiences to improve booking conversion, inquiry conversion, average order value, attach rate, and other customer engagement metrics.
• Extend our design system with scalable primitives, components, and patterns that create consistency across the product.
• Own and maintain our Figma library, including variables, styles, and components, keeping designs aligned with what ships to production.
• Create detailed, responsive designs that clearly define states, breakpoints, and behaviours so Engineering can confidently build from your files.
• Partner with Product Managers to develop A/B testing plans, using data and experimentation to validate ideas and improve the customer experience.
  

You may be the right person for this role if you:

• Have a deep understanding of UX best practices in a marketplace or e-commerce environment, with a strong focus on creating intuitive, customer-centered experiences.
• Bring strong design system expertise, including hands-on experience with Figma Variables, styles, components, and design tokens to create scalable designs that translate effectively into production.
• Have experience with usability research and A/B testing, using customer insights and data to validate hypotheses and deliver design improvements that measurably impact product or business KPIs.
• Have a mobile-first mindset, with experience designing responsive, accessible experiences that meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards and consider performance throughout the design process.
• Can balance rapid iterations with larger redesign initiatives and are comfortable using AI-powered design tools to explore, evaluate, and refine solutions.
• Love to learn and grow – you challenge yourself to learn, fail, and constantly improve, whether that’s through formal education or by gaining professional experience.

Some bonuses for us are if you:

• Have experience in travel, e-commerce, or three-sided marketplaces.
• Have worked with a headless CMS where content length and quantity can vary based on editor input.
• Love using data to identify opportunities, validate your instincts, and frame productive discussions.

At ToursByLocals, we believe great talent comes from all backgrounds. Our travellers and guides come from all walks of life, and so do we! We encourage candidates of all experiences to apply, even if you don’t meet 100% of the qualifications. 

We are committed to equitable compensation across regions. The hiring range for this role in Canada is $75,000-$90,000 CAD/year. We look forward to discussing this with you during our hiring process.

We want to make your recruitment experience as smooth as possible. If you require accommodations during the application or interview process, please let us know when applying—we’re happy to help!

Why ToursByLocals?

Founded in Vancouver in 2008, ToursByLocals is the go-to platform for private tours worldwide. With a presence in over 170 countries, we enrich people’s travel by connecting them with our network of 5,000+ expert guides to book personalized tours anywhere they’re going. Our global team of 100 support all users of the platform as they embark on one-of-a-kind travel experiences.

We offer competitive benefits based on location.

In Canada, these benefits include: 

👩‍⚕️ Health & Wellness: Comprehensive health and dental coverage for you and your family, plus up to $1,000 annual health spending account.

💻 Home Office Support: A Mac computer, accessories, and furniture to set up your workspace.

✈️ Time Off & Flexibility: Three weeks of paid vacation, additional flexible PTO, and the ability to switch statutory holidays.

✈️ Explore90 program: After one year, work from anywhere in the world for up to 90 days 

✈️ Travel Perks: A 25% discount and an annual voucher for ToursByLocals experiences.

💯 Remote Work: We are a fully remote workplace.