Product Designer

Spate is hiring a part-time contract Product Designer to shape its trend intelligence dashboard as the product evolves around LLM-powered features. The designer will identify user problems, define AI experiences, improve the design system, and work with frontend engineering to take features from discovery through launch.

Responsibilities:

• The product, not just the screens. At Spate, product design and UI/UX design happen together. Features aren't fully defined and then handed to a designer. You'll help decide what we build and why, and stay involved from the first conversation to launch. You'll work with our frontend lead to choose the right deliverable for each problem: a written proposal, a user flow, a prototype, or a full Figma spec
• Finding problems worth solving. Find user pain points on your own, through customer calls, feedback, and usage data. Then take them from problem to proposal: frame the problem, explore options, and make the case for a direction. Leadership sets the overall direction and can help point you at problems, but you won't need our input to get started
• How our AI features work. Decide when something should be a chat, a report, or an inline summary. Define how we show where an insight came from, and how we handle loading, uncertainty, and wrong answers. Help shape the voice and structure of AI-generated insights, because in an LLM product the words are part of the UX
• The design system. We have a Figma library and a React component library that are only loosely in sync. You'll own the system's principles and the Figma side, and partner with our frontend engineers to make the two a single source of truth. The goal is that everyday design decisions are answered by the system, so engineers can ship UI that feels like Spate without waiting on design
• AI quality, over time. As the role settles in, you'll help define what a good AI answer looks like for our users, and contribute to how we review user feedback and evaluate our LLM features
• First 30 days: Learn the product and the people who use it. Watch a few customer calls, review feedback and usage data, and ship your first improvements to the user experience
• By day 60: Design your first feature solving a major user pain point or goal
• By day 90: Work with the rest of the team to ship your feature into production

Requirements:

• You're driven, you care about making a good product, and you have a growth mindset
• You value autonomy and self-direction
• 2+ years of product design experience, with work shipped in a real product
• Strong product opinions. You think about what to build and why, not just how it looks, and you're comfortable defending and revising your ideas
• A portfolio that shows how you framed problems, not just how you solved them. At least one case study should start from a fuzzy problem with no spec
• Experience with, or a strong interest in, data-heavy products such as dashboards, analytics, or reporting tools
• You've worked within or contributed to a design system, and understand how components and patterns scale
• Real curiosity about AI products, ideally with some hands-on exploration
• Strong written communication
• Experience working as a freelancer or contractor, managing your own time and deliverables
• Fluent in Figma, with AI tools in your everyday workflow
• Experience as the first or only designer on a team
• You've built or substantially evolved a design system that engineers adopted
• Experience designing AI features, or reviewing the quality of LLM output
• Depth in data visualization
• Familiarity with consumer goods, beauty, food, or marketing and insights tools
• Comfort building quick functional prototypes with AI tools to test ideas against real outputs