Staff Product Designer (Visual Design & Systems), Autonomous Recruiting

About Handshake

Handshake is the career network built for the AI economy. With 20 million knowledge workers, 1,600 educational institutions, 1 million employers (including 100% of the Fortune 50), and every major AI lab trusting Handshake to power career discovery, hiring, and upskilling, we sit at the intersection of talent and opportunity at a pivotal moment in history. From freelance AI training gigs to first internships to full-time careers, Handshake is where professional journeys begin and evolve. That unique position is driving extraordinary growth: in 2025, we tripled our ARR at scale.

About the Role

We're building a new, AI-native product from the ground up—one that reimagines how recruiters and hiring managers source, engage, and manage talent from a blank slate. The visual language we set in the next few months will shape it for years.

As a Staff Product Designer, you'll set the craft bar for the product and raise it for the entire Employer design team, while owning the design system that keeps our work coherent. You're a hands-on maker first, with a clear spike in visual design. You'll design some of the best-looking, best-feeling screens on the team yourself, and make everyone else's work better through the system, craft reviews, and pairing. Our goal is enterprise-grade reliability with consumer-grade craft: a product that feels calm, intelligent, and clearly hierarchical.

This is a judgment role as much as a craft role. You'll bring a strong point of view on what belongs in the product, and what we leave out.

Your Role

• 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, keeping Figma and code in sync with engineering.

• Define motion and micro-interactions that shape how an AI product feels to use.

• Raise the bar for the whole team by leading craft reviews, pairing with designers, and documenting the principles behind good work.

• 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.

Your Experience

• 8+ years of product design experience, with a track record of setting the visual direction for a shipped B2B or prosumer product.

• Exceptional visual craft, with typography, spacing, color, hierarchy, and density visibly strong across shipped work, including edge states.

• Strong interaction and motion sense.

• Experience owning or leading a design system, with good judgment about when to use, extend, or break from it.

• Taste you can explain and teach, and a track record of raising the quality of work beyond your own team.

• Fluent in code or close to it, and invested in shipped UI matching the design.

• Strong product thinking and a bias toward simplicity.

• Comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change, and excited to build something from scratch.

Nice to Have

• Experience designing for an AI-native product, with real thinking about chat, composer, and agent interaction patterns.

We Offer

Handshake delivers benefits that help you feel supported and thrive at work and in life. The below benefits are for full-time US employees.

• 🎯 Ownership: Equity in a fast-growing company

• 💰 Financial Wellness: 401(k) match, competitive compensation, financial coaching

• 📚 Growth: $2,000 learning stipend, ongoing development

• 💻 Remote & Office: Internet, commuting, and free lunch/gym in our SF office

• 🤝 Connection: Team outings & referral bonuses