Lead Product Designer

Rec Technologies•San Francisco, CA

2d•$180,000 - $250,000•Onsite

About The Position

Rec is reimagining how the world plays, trains, competes, explores, and gets outside. Our mission is to empower the entire recreation community to thrive, and our vision is bold: power recreation worldwide. We are partnering with parks & rec departments, golf courses, campgrounds, gyms, and more to transform a $105B industry stuck in the Stone Age. We're not just putting recreation online — we're redesigning it from the ground up, for the mobile-first, AI-powered world we live in. Rec is the system of record for recreation. Every registration, booking, program, permit, and payment flows through our platform — and we're building AI directly into that surface. This means designing entirely new kinds of experiences: AI-assisted registration, intelligent staff workflows, and agents that handle operational grunt work so parks & rec staff can focus on their communities. As Lead Designer at Rec, you'll be at the center of that work — figuring out what AI-powered product experiences actually feel like for a family booking swim lessons, or a parks director trying to understand why enrollment is down.

Requirements

10+ years designing products, with meaningful depth in both consumer-facing and complex operational/admin tools.
Experience designing AI-powered features — you've thought seriously about how to make AI feel useful, trustworthy, and human.
A systems thinker. You design components and patterns, not just screens, and you care about how everything fits together.
Strong ownership instincts — you drive work forward without needing a lot of hand-holding, and you know when to align vs. when to just decide.
A natural collaborator and informal leader — people come to you for feedback, and your opinions make the work better.
Deeply user-grounded. Whether it's a parks & rec staff member juggling ten programs at once or a parent trying to register their kid on a phone, you understand your users and design for their reality.
High craft standards — you care about the details, the edge cases, and the moments nobody else notices.
A clear, confident communicator.

Responsibilities

Own end-to-end design across staff-side admin tools, consumer-facing booking and registration experiences, and the design system that scales both.
Lead the design of AI-powered product features — defining what it looks like, feels like, and how it should behave when AI is doing the work.
Build and steward Rec's design system: the components, patterns, and principles that create coherence across a fast-moving product.
Partner tightly with Product and Engineering from problem definition through launch.
Lead user research and testing across both consumer and staff audiences, and translate findings into clear design direction.
Raise the design bar across the team — through critique, mentorship, and the kind of high-craft work that others want to replicate.