Lead Design Builder: Marketplace

Alt Platform Inc • New York, NY

11d • $200,000 - $245,000 • Remote

About The Position

Alt is unlocking the value of alternative assets, starting with the $5B trading-card market. We let collectors buy, sell, vault, and finance their cards in one place and we are backed by leaders at Stripe, Coinbase, Seven Seven Six, and pro athletes like Tom Brady and Giannis Antetokounmpo. Our next frontier is real-time pricing at scale—the Alt Value that powers every trade, loan, and product on the platform.

The Role
You own the marketplace surfaces where that decision happens — listing and submission, the offer moment, bidding and auction close, payout, the places where Alt asserts a price and asks someone to act on it. Design at Alt isn't a service function that receives requirements. It's the discipline that writes them.

The bar you're held to: every surface you own ships with a written problem frame, a metric instrumented before launch, a readout you ran yourself — and craft good enough that a user screenshots it and sends it to someone. One without the other doesn't count here. A beautiful screen that didn't move anything is a miss. A number that moved on a surface nobody wants to look at is a different kind of miss.

Requirements

• Relentless curiosity about users. This is the first bar. Not "I read the research" — you go and get it.
• You've made ambiguity tractable, more than once. Not a UI problem with a brief attached: a genuinely open problem, where you had to decide what the problem even was before anyone could work on it. You can tell us how you structured the chaos, what you chose not to solve, and how you knew when you had clarity.
• Articulation as part of your craft. You can state a problem so cleanly that the room aligns before a single mock exists, and defend a trade-off to an engineer, a founder, and a customer in their own languages. If we ask "what were you actually solving?" about your best work, the answer arrives in one sentence, not a walkthrough.
• Influence without authority. You've changed what a company built through the quality of your reasoning: reframed a roadmap, killed a bad direction, gotten engineers to fight for your design's details.
• Founding, first, or early designer experience — or you've built something of your own. You know what it costs to own an outcome end to end.
• You've shipped things you conceived, not just executed from someone else's spec, and you can narrate the problem-framing behind your best work unprompted.
• A portfolio organized around problems and outcomes, not screens. You talk about your work quantitatively: what moved, what you killed, what you learned.
• You prototype in code, or in code-adjacent tools, as a thinking medium. AI is already how you work. You can name the last thing you built with Claude, Cursor, Lovable, v0, or Figma Make — and what it got wrong. We'll ask you to show us, so bring something real.

Nice To Haves

• marketplace or two-sided experience
• high-consideration or financial products where trust was the conversion problem
• consumer products with a passionate community
• you collect, or you have a view on where this market is going.

Responsibilities

• The problem. You write the framing for your surfaces: who's hurting, the evidence, the number that says it's real, the metric that says it worked. AI-assisted, design-reviewed, never skipped. If nobody can state the problem in a sentence, it isn't ready to be solved.
• The craft. How completely the solution solves the problem, all the way to delight. It runs the full arc: reading the problem so precisely that the solution feels obvious in hindsight, shaping the flow so the user never has to think about the tool. It takes a user from "this worked" to "I want to show someone." That's still made by a person with taste and reps. We can generate a hundred options in an hour; you're here because you can make one of them solve the problem so well it delights.
• The solution space. Multiple real directions, converged against your surface's written bar. You'll pressure-test, extend, and validate with users — not pick the first thing that renders.
• The experience decisions. When a thing appears, what it feels like in the user's actual state, what tone it takes, what gets removed to make room, and what it does to neighboring screens. On a platform where people wire five figures based on what a screen makes them feel, these decisions are the product.
• The words. Copy is design here. The sentence that explains why an offer is what it is does more work than the layout around it. You write it.
• Trust, specifically. How much confidence we assert, when we show uncertainty, what the platform states versus suggests. As more of what we show a user is model-generated, this becomes the highest-stakes surface in the company, and Design has sign-off on it.
• The crafted base. The quality foundation your team iterates on, and its survival through implementation. You pair with engineers at ship time; built-versus-designed fidelity is yours.
• Your metrics. Instrumented before launch. You run your own readouts and kill your own misses.
• The research. Customer conversations every week, CX tickets and session replays mined as a habit, lightweight tests run by you, at the pace of the work. Your frames cite evidence because you went and got it.
• The prototype. You build. Working prototypes in code, not click-throughs, are how ideas get evaluated here, because a thing you can touch settles an argument in an afternoon that a doc would run for two weeks.
• How You'll Use AI Here: We don't want to hear that you use Claude every day. Everyone does. We want to know what you've built with it. Concretely, in this role: Get to a clickable prototype of a new flow in a day — real card data, simulated model output, testable interactions — so the team argues about a real thing instead of a doc. Write a Claude skill that holds your surface's written bar, so every frame gets checked against it before it reaches review, and the bar stops depending on who's in the room. Mine CX tickets and session replays at volume to find the pattern you'd never catch by hand — the phrasing that precedes an abandoned submission, the screen people revisit three times before they bail. Turn a customer call into a synthesis the team can act on the same afternoon, not a deck three weeks later. Generate and kill twenty directions before you commit to one, and be able to say what each one taught you. Put a prototype in front of actual high-value sellers and come to roadmap planning with behavioral data — "version B moved stated acceptance likelihood, here's the prototype, here's the number". And have a view on the other side of it: where AI output is actively wrong for this work, and what you refuse to hand to a model. We ask. If you've built agents, written skills or MCP servers, wired up connectors, or shipped internal tooling your team actually depends on — lead with that. Name the artifact, not the tool.

Benefits

• We cover 85% of your medical, dental, and vision, and up to 50% for dependents. HSA/FSA available
• Flexible PTO that people actually take
• Parental leave at full salary
• $200/month wellness + $100/month home office stipend
• Free DoorDash membership, because dinner shouldn't be a decision
• Remote-first (for most positions), with WeWork access when you want a room with other humans
• 401(k)
• Alt Equity to all full-time employees

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed