Senior Product Designer, Games

The mission of The New York Times is to seek the truth and help people understand the world. That means independent journalism is at the heart of all we do as a company. It’s why we have a world-renowned newsroom that sends journalists to report on the ground from nearly 160 countries. It’s why we focus deeply on how our readers will experience our journalism, from print to audio to a world-class digital and app destination. And it’s why our business strategy centers on making journalism so good that it’s worth paying for. 

Mission Overview

The Games team at the New York Times — the group behind Wordle, Connections, Spelling Bee, the Daily Crossword, and more — is looking for a Senior Product Designer to design delightful and engaging experiences for our audience. You will help establish and improve our games both within and surrounding the game experience.

This is an individual contributor role. At The Times, Senior Product Designers are trusted team contributors with deepening expertise in a particular skill set. You'll design and support work that helps your team meet its goals. You'll use your craft and product thinking skills to bring clarity, sophistication, and playful experiences to our audience.

You will report to the Product Design Manager for Games. We support hybrid work. You will work in our Times Square office in New York City, New York. The Times is in the process of transitioning to hybrid work and we plan to speak with all candidates about where they're based and how they work in a hybrid environment.

Responsibilities:

• Support high-level product strategy, ensuring we're asking the right questions that solve user needs.
• Partner with user researchers and data analysts to identify pain points and develop research-backed hypotheses to help inform design directions? . 
• Use behavioral data and qualitative and quantitative research to inform your design decisions.
• Explore divergent design concepts, create artifacts that communicate design rationale and advocate for a solution by presenting your work.
• Break down big challenges into smaller decisions and frame as tradeoffs (e.g. time vs. scope).
• Develop information architecture for complex user journeys. 
• Design and advocate for both business and user needs and outcomes.
• Create functional prototypes of proposed UX solutions used to gather feedback with users.
• Anticipate and solve for different entry points, exit points, system states, and user states in proposed interactions.
• Create production-ready design deliverables and partner with Engineers to ensure proper implementation.
• Communicate the progress and outcome of your work to your teammates and across the Games organization.

Basic Qualifications: 

• 4+ years of relevant experience working within cross-functional teams.
• You have a portfolio of work that showcases your thought process along with finished design work. Applications without portfolios will not be considered.
• 3+ years of experience using Figma or equivalent software.
• 3+ years of experience documenting and delivering UI screens and specifications to engineers.
• Fluent in UX design best practices across mobile and web platforms, and strong knowledge of usability principles and techniques.

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Interaction design skills that allow you to communicate your intent.
• Understanding of constraints and opportunities of technologies used to build modern digital experiences.
• Demonstrated visual and typographic sensibilities.
• Experience facilitating discovery sessions with partners and multi-disciplinary team members.
• Enthusiastic about the big picture and the smallest micro-interactions.
• Experience designing across responsive web and native app experiences.

REQ-016044

The annual base pay range for this role is between:$116,000—$140,000 USD

The New York Times is committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce, one that reflects the varied global community we serve. Our journalism and the products we build in the service of that journalism greatly benefit from a range of perspectives, which can only come from diversity of all types, across our ranks, at all levels of the organization. Achieving true diversity and inclusion is the right thing to do. It is also the smart thing for our business. So we strongly encourage women, veterans, people with disabilities, people of color and gender nonconforming candidates to apply.

The New York Times Company is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of an individual's sex, age, race, color, creed, n