SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Handshake is a career network platform serving 20 million knowledge workers, 1,600 educational institutions, and 1 million employers (including all Fortune 50 companies). The company is building an AI-native recruiting product from the ground up, and this role is critical to establishing its visual and interaction language.
As Staff Product Designer, you will own the visual design and design system for Handshake's new Employer product. You are a hands-on maker with a clear spike in visual design—you'll design high-quality screens yourself while raising the craft bar across the entire Employer design team. Your responsibilities include:
- Owning visual and interaction quality of the product's most important surfaces, from exploration through shipped UI
- Owning and maintaining the design system for the Employer design team, keeping Figma and code synchronized with engineering
- Defining motion and micro-interactions that shape how the AI product feels to use
- Leading craft reviews, pairing with designers, and documenting principles behind good work to raise team quality
- Partnering closely with product, engineering, and data to shape the overall product experience
- Collaborating with designers across the broader employer experience to ensure coherence and unity
The role balances craft excellence with judgment: you'll bring a strong point of view on what belongs in the product and what to leave out. The goal is enterprise-grade reliability with consumer-grade craft—a product that feels calm, intelligent, and clearly hierarchical.
Handshake tripled ARR at scale in 2025 and is at a pivotal moment in the AI economy.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 8+ years of product design experience with a track record of setting visual direction for a shipped B2B or prosumer product
- Exceptional visual craft: 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, with a track record of raising quality of work beyond your own team
- Fluent in code or close to it, and invested in shipped UI matching design
- Strong product thinking and bias toward simplicity
- Comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change, excited to build from scratch
NICE TO HAVE:
- Experience designing for AI-native products, with real thinking about chat, composer, and agent interaction patterns
