Staff Product Designer
About The Position
At Apartment List, we’re not just designing better products; we’re rethinking the experience of renting from the ground up. As a Staff Product Designer, you’ll lead high-impact work across complex problem spaces, shaping elegant solutions that scale and make real life easier for millions of renters. We’re looking for a Staff Product Designer with deep product intuition, systems-level thinking, and refined craft, who is excited about the role AI can play in shaping thoughtful, human-centered experiences. You’ll be part of a small, collaborative design team, working closely with product, engineering, research, and data. In this role, you won’t just make things look good. You’ll help decide what “good” actually means, and reinforce it through patterns, principles, and a high quality bar. This is a hands-on, high-leverage IC role reporting to our Head of Design.
Requirements
- Staff-level experience: 8+ years designing and shipping consumer or platform products across mobile, desktop, and web, ideally with experience working on a two-sided marketplace.
- AI-native mindset: You think of AI as part of the product development system, not just a design aid, and use our AI tooling to strengthen design-to-code workflows and cross-functional execution.
- Hybrid craft skills: Strong interaction, visual, and motion design skills, with a love for rapid prototyping and iterative execution.
- Comfort with ambiguity: You excel in loosely defined problem spaces, especially emerging AI surfaces, and can simplify complex systems into intuitive experiences.
- Systems thinking: Proven experience contributing to and evolving design systems that scale across teams and products.
- Strong product thinking: Ability to frame problems, define success, and drive outcomes through clear communication and cross-functional collaboration.
- Implementation-minded: Familiarity with front-end technologies (HTML/CSS/JS or frameworks) and a strong partnership mindset with engineering.
- Highly collaborative: Proactive, inclusive partner who brings others in early and leads through influence.
- Low ego, high bar: Generous with feedback, open to critique, and committed to raising the quality of the team’s work.
Nice To Haves
- You have a curious mind, and genuinely want to learn about the problems you solve
- You talk about how you think, not just what you shipped
- You bring engineers and PMs into your success stories
- You’ve explored AI tools and understand where they help (and where they don’t)
- You’re excited by the idea of teaching and learning with peers
- You care deeply about quality, clarity, and thoughtful decision-making
Responsibilities
- Lead product design from problem framing through polished execution, with clear hypotheses and measurable outcomes
- Design scalable, user-centered solutions across surfaces, thinking in systems, not screens
- Collaborate closely with engineers to ensure design-to-code alignment and build feasible, modular components
- Leverage AI tools to rethink how we design and ship, using them to speed up exploration, critique, content creation, and synthesis across the product lifecycle.
- Advance our design system in partnership with engineers, balancing consistency with flexibility
- Prototype ideas quickly and at various levels of fidelity to unlock thinking and drive alignment
- Facilitate workshops, critiques, and collaborative sessions that energize and unblock
- Mentor other designers through thoughtful feedback and modeling high craft standards
Benefits
- Make magic in the move by designing experiences that feel smart, personal, and radically easier
- Have unapologetically high standards for craft, clarity, and impact
- Use speed to our advantage by reinventing how we design and ship with AI, delivering quality quickly and iterating fast.
- Dare to diverge, welcoming new ideas, tools, and perspectives
- Are proudly remote-first and deeply invested in DEI, learning, and long-term growth
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
