Senior Product Designer

Job description

**Own the problems, not the tickets.** Senior design roles often quietly shrink into review-and-approve: polish someone else's direction, unblock the team, keep the system tidy. This one is the opposite. You'll own hard product areas end-to-end, shape how a problem is framed before anyone opens a canvas, and set the craft bar the rest of the team designs to. Design here is a stakeholder in what gets built, not a service that makes it look good afterward. Getting there takes craft all the way down: the transitions, the states most teams never design for, the edge cases that ship right instead of looking broken. As a senior designer here, your work becomes the reference point for what good looks like, and you help every designer around you get there faster. **Transform Education Through Design** We help schools increase their fundraising efficiency and keep their alumni communities active. As one of India's few profitable, bootstrapped SaaS companies, we're building lasting value for our team, customers, and the educational institutions we serve. **Our Impact:** - 6 million alumni connected - 500,000 students impacted - $10M+ in donations raised - 54 million engagement opportunities created - Profitable and bootstrapped since day one. # **The Role** You'll join our 25-person product team (product, design, engineering, and quality)as the senior craft voice on a five-person design team, working alongside the design lead and three product designers. You'll design for multiple audiences with distinct needs: advancement professionals, alumni, students, and administrators. Each brings a different level of technical comfort and an emotional relationship with their institution. The workflows are genuinely complex (fundraising campaigns, event management, alumni communities, data-heavy admin tools), and the bar is to make them feel simple. Design at Almabase is a key stakeholder, not a service function. You'll shape how problems are framed before a single screen is drawn, push back with evidence, and own the direction of the product areas you work on. **Why we're hiring senior now** - **Complex product areas that need an owner**: Permissions, integrations, and data-heavy workflows where the design decisions shape the product's direction, not just its surface. - **We want to raise the bar with a senior systems thinker:** Someone who sees how flows, the product, the business, and the design system connect, and whose judgment lifts the whole team's work, not just their own. - **A real accessibility remit:** Our customers include publicly funded US universities, and we back WCAG AA and VPATs contractually, so making accessibility a default in our system is genuine, resume-worthy work you'll help own. **What You'll Own** **End-to-End Product Design** - Own the complete design process, from problem framing to shipped product, for key product areas - Take concepts to working prototypes in days using AI tooling, and validate with real users and data - Set the craft benchmark: interaction, visual, and motion quality that others reference without being asked. **Systems Thinking and Design System** - Bring a systems lens to your work: how flows, data, the product, and the design system connect, so what you ship scales instead of adding one-offcomplexity - Steward and evolve our design system (components, patterns, tokens, docs)as the layer that keeps designers, engineers, and AI tools all producing consistent output - Make accessibility a built-in property of the system, with WCAG AA as the baseline **Team Leverage** - Raise the bar for the designers around you through pairing, critique, andproblem-framing sessions (craft leadership, not people management; no direct reports) - Build and share the AI workflows, prompts, and practices that make the whole team faster **Cross-Functional Influence** - Partner with PMs and engineers to define problems, not just solve them; bring user evidence into roadmap conversations - Drive alignment through clear written artifacts, so decisions move fast and stay made **We're Looking For Someone Who** Frames problems before drawing boxes You interrogate the stated problem before designing. When someone says a flow is broken or unintuitive, your first move is to find out what's actually causing it and what success looks like. Thrives in complexity without creating it B2B products involve intricate workflows, but that doesn't mean they need to feel complicated. You find elegant solutions hidden inside seemingly chaotic requirements. Has taste they can articulate You don't just know what's better; you can explain why, in terms a PM or engineer can act on. Your quality bar is visible in your work and contagious in your team. Builds, not just draws Working prototypes are your default way to think and communicate. You'recomfortable using AI tools (Claude, Cursor, v0, or similar) to go from idea to something clickable fast, and you keep the judgment that separates good output from plausible output. Multiplies the people around them You've made other designers better through critique, pairing, and example. You get energy from raising a team's ceiling, not just your own. **You'll Be a Great Fit If You** - **Want ownership, not tickets:** You're looking for a seat at the table where design shapes direction - **Obsess over details:** You sweat colors, typography, states, and edge cases, and you ship them right - **Iterate relentlessly:** The first version is a starting point; you keep improving based on what you learn - **Love the full lifecycle:** Discovery, framing, building, shipping, and measuring what happened after - **Treat AI as a daily collaborator:** It's already part of how you explore, prototype, and polish **This Role Is NOT For You If** - You prefer pure strategy over hands-on craft (this role ships work, constantly - You need designs handed off and never revisited (we iterate in the open, with engineers **Required Experience & S