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Founding Product Designer

Handshake
San Francisco, United Statesfull_timeVerifiedPosted 21 Feb 2025
💰 $250,000/yr($200,000/yr$250,000/yr)

About the role

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

Handshake is expanding into AI research and development, building a world-class network of expert Fellows - PhDs, researchers, and subject matter specialists - who contribute to cutting-edge AI through specialized research, model evaluation, and domain-specific applications. We’re looking for a Product Designer to build high-impact products that support our Fellows in their work, ensuring they have the tools and infrastructure needed to drive AI innovation.

This is a unique opportunity to play a pivotal role in a fast-growing space, working directly with leading AI labs and tech companies to develop solutions that enhance research workflows, model evaluation processes, and domain-specific AI applications. You will build critical features for products from the ground up, collaborating closely with product, design, and engineering teams to create seamless and effective experiences.

Your role

  • Organize, craft, and iterate on AI products: you'll use data, research and product thinking to form your vision, and make the future tangible by painting possible paths forward in pixels and prototypes 
  • Collaborate closely with your cross-functional partners: research, PM, engineering, analytics, design systems, brand, marketing – to ship and iterate on strategic, well-thought-out, surprisingly great-to-use designs that make real impact for both our customers and business
  • Help the team raise our bar on quality and execution of design work, including product reasoning, systems thinking, pixel level precision, prototyping, ability to facilitate conversations with and present to stakeholders, stellar teamwork and mentoring
  • Strengthen the team’s ability to experiment, iterate, ship, and learn, both by creating visual artifacts / organizing information in ways that make conversations / decision-making easier

Your experience

  • You've designed and shipped features that customers love, ideally for both mobile and desktop, and can articulate what it took to make that happen, from product 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, kind, 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, LLM products in production

Compensation range

  • $200,000-$250,000

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, and career educators, Handshake’s network is where career advice and discovery turn into first, second, and third jobs. Nearly 1 million companies use Handshake to build their future workforce—from Fortune 500 to federal agencies, school districts to startups, healthcare systems to small businesses. Handshake is built for where you’re going, not where you’ve been.

When it comes to our workforce strategy, we’ve thought deeply about how work-life should look at Handshake. With our hybrid-work model, employees benefit from collaboration and shared team experiences three days per week in our vibrant offices, and enjoy the flexibility of remote work two days per week. Handshake is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York, London, and Berlin.

What we offer

At Handshake, we'll give you the tools to feel healthy, happy and secure.

Benefits below apply to employees in full-time po

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Company

Handshake

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