Senior Product Designer

Why we’re hiring for this role

Since launching the newest version of Elicit last fall, the response has been overwhelming. We hit $1 million in ARR 4 months after introducing Elicit Plus, our subscription plan for users conducting literature reviews, and regularly serve a few hundred thousand MAUs through word of mouth alone.

This is incredibly energizing for our team, but we want to innovate on how Elicit works and ship more useful functionality to our core paying users even faster.

We need a strong design leader to create and advocate for exceptional user experiences within this complex, information-heavy problem space. That’s where you come in.

You’ll fully own

• Solving Elicit’s toughest UX, UI, and interaction challenges. You will rarely (if ever) start with a fully defined design project at Elicit. You’ll get to work across functions to push the progression of the product and shape how Elicit works. We need you to think through intuitive, focused design solutions to help our users move elegantly through their most critical workflows.

• All design projects from concept through launch. You’ll lead the team’s approach toward new features and improvements in Elicit by setting the vision for the user experience, generating and validating solutions, and evolving experiences to have the greatest possible impact. You’ll drive projects end-to-end, from prototype to implementation.

• Elicit’s overall design strategy and decisions. We want you to define the product design strategy across the whole team and advocate for a design-centric approach to building Elicit. Ultimately, you will be responsible for Elicit’s design patterns and system across all properties.

You'll also support

• Embodying the voice of our users. You’ll work with the team to develop a deep understanding of users’ behaviors, drive user research, and leverage that information into hypotheses and design experiments that guide us toward the best user outcomes.

• Ensuring the success of new Elicit features. You’ll work closely with the Head of Product and our team of engineers to build out the roadmap, define success metrics for new features and improvements to Elicit, ensure high-quality implementation, and ship at a high velocity.

• Start setting the foundation for Elicit’s overall design strategy and approach. You’ll help support the early processes we need to ensure we’re keeping a design-centric approach to user experiences. Eventually, you might also help with hiring and building out our team’s capabilities over time.

You’ll thrive in this role at Elicit if

• You’re excited to launch a new feature every week. We take lots of bets, avoid analysis paralysis, and value rapidly improving Elicit. You’ve got great instincts for when to be detail-obsessed vs. when a faster feedback loop will lead us to the best outcome, and are comfortable keeping multiple work streams moving forward at once.

• You care about research and good reasoning in the world.

• You break down complex design problems to first principles. We care most about designing for what our user want to do most and solving their most critical problems.

Requirements

• Senior-level or higher experience as a Product Designer in a high-velocity start-up environment (at least P4 as described here).

  • We would also be open to more senior people interested in a Head of Design role.

• A strong portfolio showcasing your track record of producing thoughtful, impactful work solving challenges in a highly complex and interactive problem space. We’d be especially interested in hearing about your experience designing technical products and complex web apps.

• High standards of craftsmanship that you have honed throughout your history of shipping high quality consumer-facing experiences at a rapid pace.

• Strong customer-centric sensibilities, the ability to uncover and solve for non-obvious user needs, and a deep interest in solving difficult interaction challenges.

• Experience with modern design tech stack. We use Figma for design and prototyping, but you’re welcome to use whatever you’re comfortable in. If you have some front-end skills, we’d also be very interested in hearing from you!

Salary and benefits

In addition to working on important problems as part of a happy, productive, and positive team, we also offer great benefits (with some variation based on work location):

• Flexible work environment. You can work from our office in Oakland or remotely with time zone overlap (between GMT and GMT-8).

• Regular in-person retreats and coworking events.

• Fully covered health, dental, vision, and life insurance for you + generous coverage for the rest of your family.

• Flexible vacation policy with a minimum recommendation of 20 days per year.

• 401(k) with a 6% employer match.

• $2,000 device budget to start, with more accumulating to keep your tools up to date.

• Budgets for personal and professional development.

• A team administrative assistant to help you with personal and work tasks, so you can focus on your core job.

For all roles at Elicit, we use a data-backed compensation framework to keep salaries market-competitive, equitable, and simple to understand.

• For this role, we’re targeting a range of $165K-200K, depending on your level and competencies you’d bring to the role.

• We offer above-market equity for all roles at Elicit, as well as employee-friendly equity terms (10-year exercise periods).

You can find even more reasons to work with us in this thread!