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.