Product Designer (US - Part-time, Contract)

Spate

20d•Remote

About The Position

Spate is hiring a part-time contract Product Designer to shape its core product: a dashboard where consumer-brand teams explore trends, build reports, and use an AI assistant. The platform is expected to evolve as Spate rebuilds around LLM-powered features, including an AI Assistant, AI Reports, and in-dashboard summaries and analysis. The designer will help determine what these experiences should do, as well as how they should look, with a focus on making dense trend data clear and actionable for users who are not necessarily data analysts. The designer will join the four-person Frontend & UX team and work closely with the frontend lead. The role is fully remote, approximately 20 hours per week, and requires residence in US Central or US Eastern Time, plus availability for core collaboration hours from 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM Eastern. The role covers product direction and design from initial problem discovery through launch. The designer will identify user pain points using customer conversations, feedback, and usage data; frame problems and propose solutions; shape AI interaction patterns and the presentation of AI-generated insights; and own the principles and Figma side of Spate's design system while partnering with frontend engineers to align it with the React component library. Over time, the designer will also help define AI answer quality and contribute to reviewing user feedback and evaluating LLM features. The role does not include writing production code, brand or marketing design, or design for other product surfaces such as the API and MCP server. Compensation is $75 per hour, at approximately 20 hours per week as an independent contractor.

Requirements

At least 2 years of product design experience, including work shipped in a real product.
A portfolio demonstrating problem framing, including at least one case study that begins with a loosely defined problem and no specification.
Strong product judgment and the ability to think about what to build and why, defend ideas, and revise them.
Experience with or strong interest in data-heavy products such as dashboards, analytics, or reporting tools.
Experience working within or contributing to a design system and understanding how components and patterns scale.
Curiosity about AI products, ideally with hands-on exploration.
Strong written communication, including the ability to communicate proposals and decisions clearly in a remote, part-time setting.
Experience working as a freelancer or contractor and managing one's own time and deliverables.
Fluency in Figma and use of AI tools in an everyday workflow.
Availability for approximately 20 hours per week and core collaboration hours from 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM Eastern.
Residence in US Central Time or US Eastern Time.

Nice To Haves

Experience as the first or only designer on a team.
Experience building or substantially evolving a design system adopted by engineers.
Experience designing AI features or reviewing LLM output quality.
Depth in data visualization.
Familiarity with consumer goods, beauty, food, or marketing and insights tools.
Comfort building quick functional prototypes with AI tools to test ideas against real outputs.

Responsibilities

Help decide what product features to build and why, and stay involved from initial discussions through launch.
Work with the frontend lead to choose appropriate design deliverables, such as written proposals, user flows, prototypes, or full Figma specifications.
Identify user pain points through customer calls, feedback, and usage data; frame problems, explore options, and propose a direction.
Shape AI experiences by deciding when information should be presented as chat, a report, or an inline summary.
Define how AI insights show their sources and how the product handles loading, uncertainty, and incorrect answers.
Help shape the voice and structure of AI-generated insights.
Own the design system's principles and Figma library, partnering with frontend engineers to align it with the React component library as a single source of truth.
Help define what constitutes a good AI answer for users and contribute to feedback review and evaluation of LLM features.
Learn the product and its users, review feedback and usage data, and ship initial user-experience improvements during the first 30 days.
Design a feature addressing a major user pain point or goal by day 60, and work with the team to ship it to production by day 90.