Staff Product Designer (Visual Design & Systems), Autonomous Recruiting
About The Position
Handshake is building a new AI-native recruiting product from the ground up to reimagine how recruiters and hiring managers source, engage, and manage talent. The Staff Product Designer will establish the product’s visual language and craft standards, creating a calm, intelligent, clearly hierarchical experience with enterprise-grade reliability and consumer-grade craft. This is a hands-on role with a strong visual-design focus, combining individual design work with ownership of the Employer design team’s design system and broader efforts to raise team quality. The role also calls for sound judgment about what belongs in the product and what should be left out.
Requirements
- At least 8 years of product design experience, including setting visual direction for a shipped B2B or prosumer product.
- Exceptional visual craft demonstrated in shipped work, including strong typography, spacing, color, hierarchy, density, and edge states.
- Strong interaction and motion sense.
- Experience owning or leading a design system, with good judgment about when to use, extend, or depart from it.
- Taste that can be explained and taught, and a track record of raising work quality beyond one’s own team.
- Fluency in code or close familiarity with it, and investment in ensuring shipped UI matches the design.
- Strong product thinking and a bias toward simplicity.
- Comfort with ambiguity and rapid change, and enthusiasm for building from scratch.
Nice To Haves
- Experience designing for an AI-native product, with thoughtful approaches to chat, composer, and agent interaction patterns.
Responsibilities
- Own the visual and interaction quality of the product’s most important surfaces, from early exploration through shipped UI.
- Own the design system for the Employer design team and keep Figma and code aligned with engineering.
- Define motion and micro-interactions that shape how the AI product feels to use.
- Raise the team’s craft bar by leading craft reviews, pairing with designers, and documenting design principles.
- Partner closely with product, engineering, and data to shape the product experience.
- Collaborate with designers across the broader employer experience to ensure a coherent, unified product.
Benefits
- Equity in a fast-growing company.
- 401(k) match.
- Competitive compensation.
- Financial coaching.
- Paid parental leave.
- Fertility benefits.
- Parental coaching.
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
- Mental health support.
- $500 wellness stipend.
- $2,000 learning stipend and ongoing development.
- Internet and commuting benefits.
- Free lunch and gym access at the San Francisco office.
- Flexible PTO, 15 holidays, and 2 flex days.
- Team outings and referral bonuses.
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
