Everyone is welcome at Handshake. We know diverse teams build better products and we are committed to creating an inclusive culture built on a foundation of respect for all individuals. We strongly encourage candidates from non-traditional backgrounds, historically marginalized or underrepresented groups to apply.

Your Impact

Remember the uncertainty of searching for your first job? First internship, second job? Does anyone slide seamlessly into the start of their careers? Most of us don’t; for millions of students every year, it feels like a mission fraught with invisible traps, no map, and the looming prospect of bills to pay. Access to help is not evenly distributed: not to connections nor to information on what's even possible out there. 

That's where Handshake comes in. Our mission is to democratize access to opportunity: to help every student find the right job, no matter where they're from or who they know. We’re the career network for Gen Z, with over 15M+ job seekers, almost 1M employers, and 1500+ career centers coming together on our platform. Students need jobs and career guidance and nascent professional community, employers want to find and make great student hires, and career centers help us help everyone, ensuring it's not just students in-the-know who get in our doors. We’re seeking you and your design chops to help make it the best experience for all those involved!

Come help make our design team world-class to tackle this very tangible, incentives-aligned, real-world problem. As a Staff level designer, you’ll be helping lead the charge alongside your Design Lead teammates, making what we do rigorous, impactful, and joyful because, well, life is short. Let's do work that matters, together, and enjoy it as we go.

Your Role

• Organize, craft, and iterate on large, strategic design initiatives: you'll use data, research and product thinking to form your product vision, and make that future tangible by painting possible paths forward in pixels and prototypes
• Collaborate closely with your partners, both cross-functionally and within design: research, PM, engineering, analytics, design systems, brand, marketing – to ship and iterate on strategic, well-thought-out, surprisingly great-to-use products that make real impact for both our customers and business
• Help your team succeed: raise the bar on culture, operations, and execution of design work, including product reasoning, systems thinking, pixel level precision, mobile prototyping, ability to facilitate conversations with and present to stakeholders, stellar teamwork and mentoring
• Strengthen the overall product organization's ability to experiment, iterate, and learn alongside your product organization lead teammates; develop well-informed strategic visions of where we're headed, collaborate to break them into pragmatic phases to scaffold our way forward
• Inform creative direction and information architecture alongside your design leader teammates and the VP of Design to weave a seamless, symbiotic experience across the disparate areas of our three-sided marketplace

Your Experience

• You've designed and shipped products, including mobile and desktop, that customers love, and can systematically, clearly articulate what it took to make that happen, from high-level strategy down to pixel-level decision-making
• You know how to roll data, research, business goals, technical constraints, and customer needs together into strongly-crafted solutions (mocks, prototypes, flows); you iterate fast, ensure you gather feedback, use strategic reasoning to inform your decisions
• You relish using your design skills to bring clarity and simplicity to both process and product
• You're humble and kind despite your track record, excited to keep learning, curious about the workings of a three-sided marketplace and ever-evolving team / product surface area
• Extra bonus if you're experienced with one or more of: multi-sided marketplaces, growth, design systems, b2b

Compensation Range

$185,000-$240,000

For cash compensation, we set standard ranges for all U.S.-based roles based on function, level, and geographic location, benchmarked against similar stage growth companies. In order to be compliant with local legislation, as well as to provide greater transparency to candidates, we share salary ranges on all job postings regardless of desired hiring location. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including geographic location as well as candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.

About us

Handshake is the career platform for Gen Z. With a community of over 17 million students, alumni, employers