Principal Product Designer. Brand and Experience (Contract, Hands-On)

OfferUp • Bellevue, WA

38d

About The Position

OfferUp is seeking a senior, hands-on product design leader to help shape the product experience. The goal is to translate OfferUp's brand strategy into practical product-experience principles and design frameworks. This role involves identifying opportunities to make the product more comprehensible, locally relevant, trustworthy, and recognizably OfferUp. The designer will create prototypes, develop testable hypotheses, and collaborate with UX Design and Consumer Product teams to ship and measure work. A key aspect is building reusable interaction, visual, and content patterns to strengthen the product design system. The engagement aims to determine if distinctive experience design can create measurable value and to establish a more durable way of producing such experiences.

Requirements

• Significant experience designing beloved consumer mobile products at scale.
• A portfolio showing both strong interaction design and sophisticated visual judgment.
• Demonstrated ability to translate a brand or product strategy into an end-to-end digital experience.
• Experience improving discovery, marketplace, commerce, social, community or local products.
• Fluency in experimentation, behavioral metrics and qualitative research.
• Experience creating or evolving product design systems.
• The executive communication skills to influence senior Product and business leaders.
• Comfort entering an established product with meaningful legacy behavior, technical constraints and deeply monitored performance metrics.
• Experience acting as a Principal Designer, Design Director, Head of Product Design or equivalent hands-on design leader.

Responsibilities

• Translate OfferUp's brand strategy into practical product-experience principles, and design the frameworks and artifacts that make those principles usable by product and engineering.
• Identify the highest-value opportunities to make the product more comprehensible, locally relevant, trustworthy and recognizably OfferUp.
• Design a small number of strategically important user experiences in Figma from concept through engineering-ready hand-off.
• Develop testable hypotheses connecting design decisions to user and business outcomes, and build the prototypes needed to test them.
• Partner closely with UX Design and Consumer Product teams to prototype, validate, ship and measure the work — hands-on for the core design deliverables, not delegating execution.
• Build reusable interaction, visual and content patterns — component-level design work — that strengthen the broader product design system.
• Assess the design operating model and recommend the appropriate long-term capability, informed by direct hands-on experience building within the current structure.
• Move comfortably from strategy to detailed interface design.
• Produce exceptional work personally rather than only directing others.
• Explain the user and business reasoning behind design decisions.
• Collaborate with quantitatively oriented product partners without reducing every decision to local optimization.
• Design, execute, and leverage user research and experimentation to strengthen judgment.
• Work within technical constraints while identifying where those constraints should be challenged.
• Build alignment across Product, Marketing/Brand, UX, and Engineering.
• Raise the quality of the existing team through critique, modeling and practical systems.

Benefits

• Compensation is structured as an hourly contract rate to reflect the fractional, non-benefits-eligible nature of this role.
• This role is not eligible for health benefits, paid time off, retirement contributions, bonus, commission, or equity.

What This Job Offers

• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed