Lead Product Designer New

Circle is building the world’s leading all-in-one platform for online communities, enabling creators and businesses to engage with their audiences. The Lead Product Designer will own design for a critical product area, collaborating closely with product managers and engineers to shape the user experience and influence product strategy.

Responsibilities:

• Own a product area end-to-end: identify opportunities, frame the problem, set design direction, and ship—operating as a peer to Product and Engineering, not a downstream executor
• Design complex, multi-step product flows that serve multiple user types—balancing creator needs against member experience, and making sophisticated behavior feel simple
• Prototype and test at speed—using AI-assisted tools, code-generation workflows, and whatever gets you to a testable concept fastest
• Influence product strategy beyond your own surface: contribute to roadmap conversations, flag opportunities other teams miss, and connect dots across the product
• Drive the craft standard on your area—interaction design, visual quality, and the small details that separate polished product from “good enough”
• Collaborate closely with engineers and design engineers to turn concepts into working, shippable experiences—not hand off specs and hope
• Raise the bar for the broader design team through feedback, shared frameworks, and the quality of your own output

Requirements:

• Strong alignment with our values
• You are proficient in English (spoken, written, and reading) at a CEFR Level C2 / ILR Level 5
• 5–7+ years of product design experience. Your portfolio should show systems-level thinking: shipped 0• 1 work, complex multi-user flows, and evidence that you shaped the product direction—not just the interface
• Experience operating as the most senior designer on a product area—setting direction, making tradeoffs, and owning outcomes without constant guidance
• Strong prototyping skills—you build clickable, realistic prototypes yourself. Bonus if you're already using AI-assisted prototyping tools like Cursor, Claude Code, v0, or Lovable
• Proficiency in Figma for high-fidelity design and collaboration
• Exceptional written and verbal communication—able to clearly explain complex ideas, influence decisions, and align teams asynchronously. You write well because that's how decisions get made in a distributed team
• Comfortable designing in ambiguity and building conviction through iteration, not waiting for perfect requirements
• An active, evolving AI workflow—you already use AI tools in your design process and can speak concretely about how. This isn't a checkbox; it's a real part of how we evaluate fit