Lead Product Builder, Product & Design

Rare Candy • New York City, NY

3d • Hybrid

About The Position

Rare Candy is revolutionizing the $25 billion trading-card industry as the only community marketplace 100% dedicated to TCGs. Collectors use our AI-powered card scanner, data-rich collection tools, and jaw-dropping drops to buy, sell, rip, and showcase Pokémon, MTG, Lorcana, One Piece, and more. We've hit 10x revenue growth over the last 6 months, the business is highly profitable, and we're building the team to take this from a great product to a category-defining one. We're a 10-person team moving fast and looking for the next set of TCG-obsessed rock stars to join our team. The Role With AI, the line between product manager and product designer has collapsed. The most valuable person on a modern product team is someone who can own the entire arc of building: understanding the customer, framing the problem, defining the spec, designing the experience, prototyping it to high fidelity, testing it, and handing engineering something so clear it's a joy to build. Everything but shipping the production code. That's this role. Given the full-stack nature of the role, we’re excited to hear from candidates from PM, Design, and/or Engineering backgrounds. This is our first full-time product and design hire, and you'll own the function. You'll own product craft end-to-end: research, specs, prototypes, design, and the engineering handoff. The CEO owns the product vision and final prioritization and stays deeply involved in the work with you. This is a true partnership, not a hand-off. You should be excited about moving fast, learning quickly, and having a tremendous impact on the business and our users. This is a high-bar role, and we're willing to search for the right person. If you're a seasoned product builder who's energized by a hands-on founder, lives at the intersection of product and design, and genuinely loves trading cards, keep reading.

Requirements

• 6 to 10 years of experience shipping high-quality consumer products, with a track record of high-impact work in high-velocity environments, ideally in an early-stage startup.
• Real product-management chops and an excellent taste for UX and design.
• Fast and fluent with AI-powered prototyping tools (Figma, Claude Design, Cursor, etc), and you use them to get to high-fidelity, testable prototypes quickly.
• Deeply customer-oriented and equally comfortable with data. You can conduct research, read a funnel, and balance customer needs against business needs.
• Operate with high agency and a bias to action.
• Take responsibility for your own growth and leverage, you move decisively, and you orient relentlessly toward impact that matters, not motion for its own sake.
• A high-trust, low-ego partner who's energized, not constrained, by working closely with a hands-on founder.
• A true trading-card and collectibles nerd. You collect, you play, or you've got real fluency in the hobby, and you light up talking about sets, pulls, and the meta.

Nice To Haves

• Proven ability to own the entire arc of building: understanding the customer, framing the problem, defining the spec, designing the experience, prototyping it to high fidelity, testing it, and handing engineering something so clear it's a joy to build.
• Experience from design, product, or engineering backgrounds, with the ability to flex into all areas.
• A strong intuitive sense of user needs and polished, delightful product.

Responsibilities

• Own product end to end: from customer research and data to problem framing, to spec, to design, to high-fidelity prototype, to testing, to engineering handoff. The whole arc, everything but production code.
• Prototype to validate, not to ship: go straight to high-fidelity, interactive prototypes in Figma, Figma Make, Cursor, or whatever gets you there fastest, to pressure-test ideas and make engineering's job dramatically easier. The prototype is how we de-risk and communicate, not the thing that ships.
• Stay close to the customer and the numbers: fluent with both qualitative research and quantitative data. You tie every product decision to whether it moves active and new-user metrics.
• Partner with the CEO daily: you'll work closely framing up key decisions and strategy, building prototypes and working through feedback. You own the day-to-day output and will work collaboratively with the founders on prioritization and long-term strategy & vision.
• Collaborate across the team: work cleanly with engineering on handoff and build. Contract design support is available when you need it.
• Build the product muscle: establish just enough process to ship reliably and fast, and grow into the product leader of this company.

Benefits

• Competitive startup comp and meaningful equity upside.
• Full benefits: health, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k), and a wellness stipend.
• A monthly dogfooding budget to spend on cards, because we hire people who love this hobby.

What This Job Offers

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