Lead Product Designer

Circle is building the world's leading all-in-one platform for online communities, and they are seeking a Lead Product Designer to own design for one of their most important product areas. This role involves defining problems, shaping design direction, and collaborating with product managers and engineers to deliver exceptional user experiences.

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, find our values on our career page if you haven't read up on them yet
• 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