UI/UX Designer

Pocket Worlds; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Profitable, self-funded company

Small, high-trust team

Creative freedom

Job summary

Highrise is seeking an exceptional product designer to shape how millions experience play and friendship. You will own design problems from understanding the player and the problem through flows and wireframes to production-ready UI shipped to players.

You will iterate on live feedback from a highly engaged gaming community, strengthen our design system, and back decisions with interviews, data, and best-in-class products in and outside gaming.

Qualifications

• Portfolio demonstrates exceptional visual craft and clear thinking behind design decisions.
• Experience shipping products used by large communities is a plus.
• Strong user-centered perspective with rigorous defense of design choices.

Responsibilities

• Own design work end to end: research, flows, wireframes, prototypes, and final polished UI.

Skills

End-to-end design

User-centered design

Visual craft

Ownership mentality

Speed and quality

Tools

Figma

AI-assisted workflows

Job description

About Highrise

Highrise is a social platform and virtual world with millions of players around the globe. Identity, self-expression, and play are at the core of everything we build. Our players come to Highrise to connect, create, and belong, and they spend real time and real care here. They notice the difference between good and great, and so do we.

The Role

We're looking for an exceptional product designer to shape how millions of people experience play and friendship every day.

We don't hire on years of experience. We hire on the work. This role fits two kinds of people: a junior designer with rare talent whose portfolio already outclasses most seniors, or a seasoned designer with a stellar track record shipping products used by millions. Either way, the bar on fundamentals is the same: typography, hierarchy, spacing, color, interaction. These can't be faked, and they're the first thing we look at.

You'll own design problems end to end: from understanding the player and the problem, through flows and wireframes, to polished, production-ready UI that ships. You're not handing off to the next person in the pipeline. You're seeing it through to the moment it lands in players' hands, and then you're watching how it lands. We ship fast, we iterate on live feedback from one of the most engaged communities in gaming, and we hold everything we release to a standard our players can feel.

This is a high-output, high-accountability, and high-reward role. If that excites you instead of intimidating you, that's the energy we're looking for.

What You'll Do

• Own design work end to end: research, flows, wireframes, prototypes, and final polished UI. Shipped, not just mocked

• Design experiences around play, self-expression, and friendship that feel effortless to millions of players across a deep, complex product

• Build on and strengthen our design system: establish patterns where they don't exist, and hold the line on consistency where they do

• Back your decisions with evidence: player interviews, usage data, and a sharp study of the best products in and outside of gaming

• Iterate relentlessly on live feedback. You care how the work performs in players' hands, not just how it looks in Figma

What We're Looking For

• A portfolio that speaks for itself: impeccable visual craft, clear thinking behind every decision, and fundamentals strong enough that they need no explanation

• One of two profiles: an early-career designer whose talent and rate of growth are impossible to ignore, or an experienced designer who has shipped world-class product design at scale. We care about the quality of the work, not the length of the résumé

• Real taste, backed by rigor: a strong user-centered point of view, and the research and reasoning to defend it

• The ability to produce exceptional work fast. Speed and quality are both non-negotiable

• Fluency in Figma and modern design tooling. Comfort with AI-assisted workflows is a plus. Whatever gets you to the best result, fastest, as long as the taste and final decisions are yours

• A complete ownership mentality. You find the problems worth solving, you drive the work forward, and you make everyone around you sharper

• A genuine love of games, social products, or virtual worlds is a strong plus. Our best work comes from people who understand why players care

What We Offer

• A profitable, self-funded company that's been building for over a decade

• A small, high-trust team where your work directly shapes an app used by millions of people globally every day

• The creative freedom, and the responsibility, to do the best work of your career