Principal Content Designer

Upwork ($UPWK) is the world's work marketplace. We serve everyone from one-person startups to large, Fortune 100 enterprises with a powerful, trust-driven platform that enables companies and talent to work together in new ways that unlock their potential.

Last year, more than $3.8 billion of work was done through Upwork by skilled professionals who are gaining more control by finding work they are passionate about and innovating their careers.

You will report into the Director of Content Design and sits within the UX design team at Upwork.

As a Principal Content Designer, we'll rely on you for your experience, your logic, and your holistic product design, not just your writing. In fact, a UXCD knows that writing is the very last mile of the job. You will partner with the Director of Content Design to act as an influencer and knowledge resource at a Principal contribution level across the company.

The Principal Content Designer will be comfortable operating with product ambiguity, passionate about creating something from the ground up, have an exceptional eye for detail, and love solving customer problems and exploring new ways to serve Upwork's clients and freelancers. You will lead cross-functional design initiatives and collaboration and represent content design with high visibility across the company, creating better outcomes for the people we serve. You'll do all this as part of a thriving and energetic remote team that has great benefits and values diversity and inclusion.

Your Responsibilities:

• An expert understanding of how to apply content design in a product context. This means working with broad cross-functional teams (often in sprints), thinking in terms of entire product experiences, including all supporting flows and interactions rather than static pages, as well as deep experience with how language works as a system to support users, bringing our brand voice and goals for our users forward, meeting users where they are.
• Collaboration and leadership as core values. We'll look for a professional who focuses on highly-strategic problems at an organizational level, creates vision for content design by partnering with leadership teams in all areas of the org, and provides leadership, direction, and mentorship to junior and senior content designers as well as educating cross-functional partners on the role of content design throughout the product development process.
• Expert knowledge of architecture and taxonomies. Our team must help draw the roadmap that our users traverse. Expert control of taxonomy, ontology, logic, information architecture, and information hierarchy are essential skill sets.
• The ability to conduct research or find data to support their decisions. (this could be partnering with UXR on interviews or by looking through customer support data like chat and call logs). It's critical that this person is able to challenge their own assumptions and can recognize when they need to change their approach or opinion.
• Excellent writing skills. Our team also leads writing for our product, and this person will need the skills to represent us well—bringing advanced skills, process setting, content design thought-leadership and expertise to Upwork.
• Seeking a content design team. This person wants to mentor, partner with, and continue to learn and grow from other content designers. They're excited about sharing their work and getting thoughtful feedback from other word lovers.

Your Responsibilities:

• Own or influence multiple complex projects beyond your immediate team, often involving a strong understanding of technical, development, or business aspects. Leverage understanding of high level business goals, the product, and the users to identify opportunities to remove friction. Partner with PMs, designers, and researchers to define project requirements and accurately list tradeoffs.
• Bring a highly strategic point of view at the org level. Craft content design deliverables that consistently level up the user experience at the org level. Advocate for and defend own work based on industry best practice, brand cohesion, and quality of ideas. Teaches out point of view on content design, backed by personal expertise, design rationale, customer data, and industry trends at the department level or above.
• Lead content design critiques and ceremonies to share your work and provide feedback to others. Lead other cross-functional team ceremonies, partner with colleagues, and delegate tasks as the project requires. Engage stakeholders and provide clear context on project status and rationale.
• Evolve Upwork's content design practice by establishing new workflows and coaching cross-functional d