Staff Product Designer - Canvas Team

Goodnotes; City Of London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A tech startup innovating digital tools is seeking a Staff Product Designer to lead the vision of its digital canvas experience. You will drive design across platforms, ensuring intuitive and effortless user interactions. Ideal candidates have over 8 years of experience, including mentoring abilities. This role offers flexibility, meaningful equity, and a supportive culture for growth.

Benefits

Meaningful equity

Budget for home office setup

Flexible working hours

Medical insurance

Sponsored visits to the office every 2 years

Qualifications

• 8+ years of product design experience, including proven impact as a Staff or Senior Staff Designer.
• Experience designing tools or creative products.
• Strong ability to turn abstract concepts into concrete design direction.

Responsibilities

• Define the vision and experience of the infinite canvas.
• Collaborate with product and engineering to evolve tools across platforms.
• Mentor and coach senior designers.

Skills

Interaction design

Systems thinking

Visual clarity

Facilitating design reviews

Collaboration

Technical understanding

Job description

At Goodnotes, we believe that every individual holds untapped potential waiting to be unleashed. By reimagining the way we interact with information, we’re merging human creativity with the breakthrough capabilities of AI. Our renewed vision and mission drive us to create the best medium for human and AI collaboration, empowering users to explore new dimensions of productivity, creativity, and learning. Join us on this journey as we transform digital note-taking into an inspiring and innovative experience.

Our Values:

• Dream big - Be visionary, strategic, and open to innovation
• Build great things - Work in service of our users, always improving and pushing higher
• Operate like an owner - Take responsibility with bold decision‑making and bias for action
• Win like a sports team - Be trusting and collaborative while empowering others
• Learn and grow fast - Never stop learning and iterate fast
• Share our passion - Share ideas and practice enthusiasm and joy
• Be user obsessed - Empathetic, inquisitive, practical

Ready to shape how millions of people think, write, and collaborate?

We’re looking for an exceptional Staff Product Designer to join our Canvas Team at Goodnotes. You’ll shape key parts of the canvas experience, how users capture thoughts, create content, and express themselves. This is a high‑impact role for someone who loves building expressive, scalable systems and solving complex interaction challenges.

About the team

The Canvas Team builds the core experience of Goodnotes: the infinite, stylus‑friendly space where ideas take shape. We design the tools that make creativity flow, including drawing, writing, diagramming, navigation, and collaboration. Our work turns any device into a seamless digital notebook for individuals and teams.

About the role

As a Staff Product Designer, you will define the vision and experience of the infinite canvas. You will lead design across multiple product areas, creating clear connections between user experience quality and measurable product outcomes. Your role is to ensure every interaction from a simple sketch to a collaborative session feels effortless and intuitive.

You will work closely with product and engineering to shape how our tools evolve across platforms and ship well‑crafted, performant, and inspiring experiences that redefine what digital handwriting and whiteboarding can be.

Design Vision and Strategy

• Shape the design direction for the Canvas, creating a cohesive and scalable experience across platforms (iOS, macOS, Windows, Android, Web).
• Translate user and business goals into clear design principles, frameworks, and success metrics.
• Collaborate with product and engineering leads to prioritize the roadmap and make strategic trade‑offs that balance craft, performance, and delivery.

Craft and Execution

• Design and prototype high‑quality interactions for handwriting, navigation, diagramming, and collaboration.
• Prototype and test at multiple fidelities to explore ideas quickly and validate with real users.
• Turn complex concepts like infinite space and real‑time input into elegant and intuitive experiences.
• Build and evolve systems, components, and guidelines that enable design consistency and speed across teams.
• Use qualitative and quantitative data to evaluate impact and refine design solutions.

Leadership and Collaboration

• Mentor and coach senior designers, raising the level of craft and systems thinking across the organization.
• Facilitate clear communication and alignment between design, product, and engineering.
• Advocate for user experience quality while balancing scope, constraints, and business priorities.
• Foster a culture of openness and trust across the design team by sharing feedback constructively and celebrating each other’s wins.
• Model collaboration, transparency, and curiosity in every project.

The skills you will need to be successful in the above:

• 8+ years of product design experience, including proven impact as a Staff or Senior Staff Designer.
• Deep expertise in interaction design, systems thinking, and visual clarity.
• Experience designing tools or creative products such as whiteboards, note‑taking, diagramming, or collaboration software.
• Strong ability to turn abstract concepts into concrete design direction and scalable systems.
• Skilled in facilitating design reviews, driving consensus, and influencing without formal authority.
• Comfortable working closely with engineers and understanding technical constraints.
• Portfolio that shows clear thinking, high craft, and measurable product outcomes.

Nice to have

• Experience with stylus, real‑time collaboration, or rendering‑heavy interfaces.
• Background in motion design, information architecture, or prototyping complex interactions.
• Thought leadership through writing, mentoring, or community contributions.

What else would help you, but is not required:

• Experience in fast‑paced startup environments.
• Familiarity with front‑end development principles.
• Thought leadership in the design community, such as speaking at conferences or publishing articles.

Even if you don’t meet all the criteria listed above, we would still love to hear from you! Goodnotes places a lot of value on learning and development and will support your growth if needed.

The interview process

• Introductory Call: A conversation with our talent acquisition team to learn more about your background, goals, and motivation to join Goodnotes.
• Hiring Manager Interview: A one‑hour portfolio walkthrough with the Hiring Manager to discuss your experience, design approach, and impact.
• Team Portfolio Review: A one‑hour session with designers and a product manager to explore your work in more depth and understand how you collaborate.
• Panel Interview: A conversation with cross‑functional partners to assess alignment, communication, and problem‑solving across disciplines.
• Thinking Together Session (AI): A 90‑minute collaborative design session focused on AI‑assisted workflows and how we can solve complex problems together.

What’s in it for you:

• Meaningful equity in a profitable tech startup.
• Budget for things like noise‑cancelling headphones, setting up your home office, personal development, professional training, and health & wellness.
• Sponsored visits to our Hong Kong or London office every 2 years.
• Company‑wide annual offsite.
• Flexible working hours and location.
• Medical insurance for you and your dependents.

Note: Employment is contingent upon successful completion of background checks, including verification of employment, education, and criminal records.

By submitting your application, you acknowledge that you have read and understood our Candidate Privacy Notice, which provides important information about the data we collect during the application process.

Candidate Demographic Questions

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