Staff Product Designer, Autonomous Recruiting

Apply; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Ownership: Equity in a fast-growing公司

Financial Wellness: 401(k) match, comp

Family Support: Paid parental leave, p

Wellbeing: Medical, dental, vision, &

Growth: $2,000 learning stipend

Time Off: Flexible PTO, holidays

Connection: Team outings & referralBon

Job summary

Handshake is building a new AI-native product from the ground up. As Staff Product Designer, you will shape foundational experience for recruiters and hiring managers, blending conversational AI, agentic automation, and structured tools.

You will work with product, engineering, and data teams to define problems, own end-to-end design, and iterate rapidly to deliver consumer-grade design in a complex enterprise workflow.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of product design experience, ideally on enterprise or B2B products with complex workflows.
• Strong communicator who articulates decisions, tradeoffs, and thinking to partners and leadership.
• Deep visual and interaction design expertise with shipped work and measurable impact.
• Comfortable incorporating generative AI tools into design, while maintaining high product thinking.
• Highly collaborative and open to diverse perspectives.
• Design-led thinker who embeds design thinking into day-to-day work.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change; eager to build from scratch.

Responsibilities

• Partner with product, engineering, and data teams to define problems, goals, and strategy for a new product area.
• Own end-to-end design from concept through post-launch iterations: flows, prototypes, and mocks.
• Translate ambiguous problems into clear, consumer-grade solutions.
• Design core interaction patterns for AI and agents, including chat and structured modes.
• Iterate quickly with wireframes and prototypes to gather feedback.
• Maintain high craft and guard a strong visual and interaction design standard.
• Collaborate with designers across the broader employer experience to ensure coherence.

Skills

Product design

Communication

Visual design

Interaction design

Collaboration

Growth mindset

Ambiguity tolerance

Hands-on

Tools

Generative AI tools

Job description

About Handshake

Handshake is the career network built for the AI economy. With 20 million knowledge workers, 1,600 educational institutions, 1 million employers—including 100% of the Fortune 50—and every major AI lab trusting Handshake to power career discovery, hiring, and upskilling, we sit at the intersection of talent and opportunity at a pivotal moment in history. From freelance AI training gigs to first internships to full-time careers, Handshake is where professional journeys begin and evolve. That unique position is driving extraordinary growth: in 2025, we tripled our ARR at scale.

About the Role

We're building a new, AI-native product from the ground up - one that reimagines how recruiters and hiring managers source, engage, and manage talent from a blank slate. This is a rare opportunity to shape a product's foundational experience rather than iterate on an existing one, working closely with an AI recruiting assistant that sits at the center of the workflow. As a Staff Product Designer on this team, you'll help define what it means to design a consumer-grade, craft-forward experience for a complex B2B workflow, with a particular focus on how users move fluidly between conversational AI, agentic automation, and traditional structured tools.

Things are moving quickly and the scope of this role will evolve, so we're looking for someone comfortable with ambiguity who can dive deep into complex workflows, simplify them, and bring a strong opinion on how people should collaborate with AI and agents day to day.

Your Role

• Partner closely with product, engineering, and data teams to define problems, set goals, and shape product strategy for a new, high-visibility product area.

• Own design end-to-end, from early concept through post-launch iteration: user flows, interaction prototypes, high-fidelity mocks, and collaboration through build.

• Tackle complex and ambiguous human-centered design problems, translating them into clear, simple, consumer-grade solutions.

• Design core interaction patterns for working with AI and agents - particularly around chat, composer, and the movement between conversational and structured parts of the product.

• Rapidly iterate through wireframes and prototypes to gather feedback early and often.

• Obsess over craft, with a strong point of view on visual and interaction design.

• Collaborate closely with designers working on adjacent parts of the broader employer experience to ensure a coherent, unified product.

Your Experience

• 7+ years of product design experience, ideally on enterprise or B2B products involving complex workflows.

• Strong communicator who clearly articulates design decisions, tradeoffs, and the thinking behind them to partners and leadership.

• Deep visual and interaction design expertise, with a proven track record of shipped work and measurable impact.

• Comfortable incorporating generative AI tools into the design process to accelerate ideation, prototyping, and iteration, while maintaining a high bar for product thinking, craft, and user experience.

• Highly collaborative. You value diverse perspectives and incorporate them into the design process to achieve better outcomes.

• Design-led thinker who raises the bar by embedding design thinking into day-to-day work and helping others grow.

• Comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change; excited to build something from scratch rather than optimize an existing system.

• Gritty and hands-on. You're willing to roll up your sleeves and take ownership—nothing is "someone else's problem."

• Curious and always learning, with a growth mindset.

Nice to Have

• Experience designing for an AI-native product with real thinking about chat, composer, and agent interaction patterns.

We Offer

Handshake delivers benefits that help you feel supported and thrive at work and in life.

The below benefits are for full-time US employees.

Ownership: Equity in a fast-growing company
Financial Wellness: 401(k) match, competitive compensation, financial coaching
Family Support: Paid parental leave, fertility benefits, parental coaching
Wellbeing: Medical, dental, and vision, mental health support, $500 wellness stipend
Growth: $2,000 learning stipend, ongoing development
Time Off: Flexible PTO, 15 holidays + 2 flex days
Connection: Team outings & referral bonuses