Product designer (us - part-time, contract)

Spate is a trend intelligence platform for consumer brands in beauty, wellness, and food and beverage. We analyze anonymous, aggregated public consumer data to spot emerging trends early and explain why they're growing, so brands can make product and marketing decisions with confidence.

Our founders, Yarden Horwitz and Olivier Zimmer, started Google's Trendspotting division and called trends like turmeric, cold brew, and face masks before they went mainstream. Spate is Y Combinator-backed, and more than 200 brands use it, including Sephora, L'Oréal Paris, Estée Lauder Companies, Unilever, P&G, and e.l.f. Our data regularly appears in The New York Times, WWD, British Vogue, and The Business of Fashion.

About the role

We're looking for a part-time contract product designer to shape Spate's core product: the dashboard where brand teams explore trends, build reports, and work with our AI assistant.

Our platform will change a lot over the next year or two as we rebuild around LLM-powered features. We already ship an AI Assistant, AI Reports (an LLM powered dashboard builder), and in-dashboard summaries and analysis. We need someone who can work out what those experiences should be, not just how they should look.

Our users are brand innovation teams, product marketers, social media teams, and agencies. Most aren't data analysts, so much of the job is turning dense trend data into something clear and actionable.

You'll join the Frontend & UX team, four people including you, and work closely with our frontend lead. The role is fully remote and part-time, about 20 hours a week. You’ll need to be based in US Central Time (UTC−6) or US Eastern Time (UTC-5). We require you to be available for core collaboration hours of 9:00 AM–12:00 PM Eastern.

This is a remote, Part-time contractor position.

What you'll own

• The product, not just the screens. At Spate, product design and UI/UX design happen together. Features aren't fully defined and then handed to a designer. You'll help decide what we build and why, and stay involved from the first conversation to launch. You'll work with our frontend lead to choose the right deliverable for each problem: a written proposal, a user flow, a prototype, or a full Figma spec.
• Finding problems worth solving. Find user pain points on your own, through customer calls, feedback, and usage data. Then take them from problem to proposal: frame the problem, explore options, and make the case for a direction. Leadership sets the overall direction and can help point you at problems, but you won't need our input to get started.
• How our AI features work. Decide when something should be a chat, a report, or an inline summary. Define how we show where an insight came from, and how we handle loading, uncertainty, and wrong answers. Help shape the voice and structure of AI-generated insights, because in an LLM product the words are part of the UX.
• The design system. We have a Figma library and a React component library that are only loosely in sync. You'll own the system's principles and the Figma side, and partner with our frontend engineers to make the two a single source of truth. The goal is that everyday design decisions are answered by the system, so engineers can ship UI that feels like Spate without waiting on design.
• AI quality, over time. As the role settles in, you'll help define what a good AI answer looks like for our users, and contribute to how we review user feedback and evaluate our LLM features.

What we're looking for

• We care more about mindset than years of experience. You're driven, you care about making a good product, and you have a growth mindset. You value autonomy and self-direction.
• 2+ years of product design experience, with work shipped in a real product.
• Strong product opinions. You think about what to build and why, not just how it looks, and you're comfortable defending and revising your ideas.
• A portfolio that shows how you framed problems, not just how you solved them. At least one case study should start from a fuzzy problem with no spec.
• Experience with, or a strong interest in, data-heavy products such as dashboards, analytics, or reporting tools.
• You've worked within or contributed to a design system, and understand how components and patterns scale.
• Real curiosity about AI products, ideally with some hands-on exploration.
• Strong written communication. We're remote and you're part-time, so your proposals and decisions need to stand on their own.
• Experience working as a freelancer or contractor, managing your own time and deliverables.
• Fluent in Figma, with AI tools in your everyday workflow.

Nice to have

• Experience as the first or only designer on a team.
• You've built or substantially evolved a design system that engineers adopted.
• Experience designing AI features, or reviewing the quality of LLM output.
• Depth in data visualization.
• Familiarity with consumer goods, beauty, food, or marketing and insights tools.
• Comfort building quick functional prototypes with AI tools to test ideas against real outputs.

Your first 90 days

At 20 hours a week, we'll keep the first three months focused.

• First 30 days: Learn the product and the people who use it. Watch a few customer calls, review feedback and usage data, and ship your first improvements to the user experience.
• By day 60: Design your first feature solving a major user pain point or goal.
• By day 90: Work with the rest of the team to ship your feature into production.

How we work

Contributors at Spate work flexibly, with few meetings, a lot of impact, and real say over the direction of their work. Leadership sets product direction and priorities, and you shape how we get there. That means bringing proposals rather than waiting for briefs.

Our aesthetic is cool, smart, data-driven, and approachable. We want a designer who can hold that line while the product changes quickly.

This role does not include:

• Writing production code. Figma is your main tool, and our frontend engineers build.
• Brand and marketing design, such as the website, sales decks, or client reports.
• Other product surfaces like our API and MCP server.

Compensation

Hourly rate: $75/hour.

About 20 hours a week, as an independent contractor.

Recruitment Process

• Video interview (30 min). About you, in your own words.
• Assessment (10 min). A quiz designed to assess your problem solving abilities and approach to work.
• Intro call with our frontend lead (~20 min). Your background, how you like to work, and whether the role fits.
• Case study (60 min). Work through a solution to a real-world problem and record your process.
• Case study review (45 min). Walk us through your case study, focusing on how you framed the problem and arrived at your solution.
• Conversation with our CEO (45 min). Product vision, how we work, and your questions.