Staff Product Designer

Staff Product Designer

Location: 100% Remote (US Candidates)

Reports To: Design Team Lead

Compensation: $110 -$120/hr DOE

Duration: Contract, 12+ Months, 40 hrs per week

We are Design Citizen, a human-centered talent studio partnering with ambitious organizations to build thoughtful, impactful products and experiences through design.

Our client, a global leader at the intersection of health and science, is investing in a small incubation team within its design organization that takes on early, high-ambiguity work. Projects include AI-assisted tooling and workflows, design standards platforms, new product concepts, and emerging technology pilots.

We are seeking a Staff Product Designer to help move that work from concept to proof to build-ready.

Why This Role Matters

This team operates at the front edge of how our client designs and builds. Every project arrives with its own context. Some come with an established style and a working prototype; others are still finding their shape and need someone who can help frame the problem.

We’re looking for a hybrid product designer who brings both the product thinking to shape the work and the visual craft to finish it. Rather than owning a single product lane, you’ll move across a portfolio of concurrent initiatives, partnering daily with creative technologists, developers, and strategists, and presenting regularly to design leadership.

This is a role for someone who treats the built product, not the design file, as the deliverable.

What You Will Do

Product & Experience Design

• Design tools and products across concurrent initiatives, taking work from early concept to a refined, build-ready product, with a focus on AI-enabled tools and workflows
• Turn loose or evolving ideas into tangible products by shaping workflows, interaction models, and system behavior, not just screens
• Bring craft and attention to detail across the whole experience, including interaction, flow, copy, motion, and visual composition
• Prototype and explore quickly, moving fluidly between fast concepts for leadership reviews and production-ready design once direction is set
• Work within component-based design systems, knowing when to follow existing patterns and when to break constraints

Craft Leadership & Ways of Working

• Set the craft standard for the team, producing sophisticated work others reference and build from
• Drive cross-functional alignment on design direction across a product area
• Contribute to AI-assisted ways of working by authoring reusable skills, patterns, and resources, and use the tools the team builds daily
• Uphold design system compliance and accessibility standards as in-workflow defaults, not post-hoc checks
• Shape team culture through critique leadership, mentorship, and active contribution to the broader design practice

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner closely with creative technologists and developers from prototype through implementation, staying hands-on to guide and refine the build
• Support validation and testing with designers and stakeholders, and drive iteration based on what testing surfaces
• Present and persuasively communicate design rationale at all levels, and build trust with collaborators across the organization

What You Bring

• 5 to 7+ years of experience in product design for digital products, tools, and platforms, with range across UX and visual design
• A strong portfolio showing products taken from concept to finished work, ideally including tools or platforms built for internal or expert users, with process shown alongside final screens
• Strong product thinking and the ability to make sound decisions while the problem is still taking shape
• Excellent visual craft, including command of type, layout, composition, and color
• Fluency with component-based design systems and the ability to build on an enterprise system while adapting to each project’s style
• Working fluency with AI-assisted design tools and workflows, and real curiosity about how they’re changing the way products get designed and built
• Experience partnering with developers or technologists to take designs through implementation
• Ability to write product copy, documentation, and design rationale with the same care you bring to layout
• Comfort with ambiguity and context-switching across concurrent projects
• Outstanding communication skills and the ability to build strong working relationships within a small embedd…