HackerRank (YC S11) is Hiring a Staff Product Designer

At HackerRank, we are on a mission to change the world to value skills over pedigree. We are a high-performing, mission-driven team that truly, madly, deeply cares about what we do. We don’t see velocity and quality as tradeoffs; both matter. If you take pride in high-impact work and thrive in a driven team, HackerRank is where you belong.

About the team:

Designers at HackerRank are members of a strong and growing creative group, while also collaborating closely with their peers in Product and Engineering within their dedicated team. This position is embedded within the Insanely Great Developer Experience team, focused on creating powerful, usable, and delightful developer experiences across product areas. How might a developer demonstrate emerging skills like prompt engineering and RAG? How might we gracefully and securely integrate an AI copilot into the IDE to demonstrate AI collaboration capabilities? How do we synthesize emerging patterns across AI-powered environments into a single standard? These are just some of the creative problems that the team is working on.

About the role:

As a Staff Product Designer, you’ll lead projects of significant scope and complexity and serve as a leader within the creative practice group. Your responsibilities will include working independently to identify problems and design innovative, high-quality solutions that resonate with users. You’ll collaborate closely with product managers, analysts, and engineers, and own design throughout the product development lifecycle from ideation and conceptualization all the way through interaction and visual design.

At HackerRank, we believe the future is human plus AI. You’ll blend a solid grasp of fundamental UI paradigms with innovative AI-powered capabilities. This role specifically focuses on the developer’s experience while interacting with our Developer Environment (DevX), including how developers demonstrate competencies across multiple skills and content types. Experience working with developer environments and AI-powered code editors is a plus

What you’ll do:

• Design and ship features that balance UI best practices within AI-powered experiences
• Work independently and strategically to identify problems worth solving and design solutions that users love
• Proactively research and prototype your ideas, including comfort in adopting new tools that shorten the time between concept and delivery
• Stay current on best-in-class developer experiences
• Work to improve systems around you, from contributing to design documentation and systems to adopting new tools that shorten the time between concept and delivery.
• Deeply care about the full user experience, from the moment they touch the product through related journeys
• Manage competing priorities and act on decisions in the face of ambiguity
• Help develop and refine best practices and methodologies for the design team, contributing to a culture of continuous improvement.
• Mentor and guide designers around you to lift the overall bar for design at HackerRank

You will thrive in this role if:

• As a Staff Product Designer at HackerRank, you're a catalyst for design excellence and a leader in our community.
• Your deep expertise in user experience enables you to tackle complex challenges, while your communication and leadership skills make you an invaluable asset to cross-functional teams.
• You have embraced the changing nature of Product Design, including introducing AI paradigms and tools, and you are committed to elevating everyone's game across the company.

What you bring:

• 7+ years of hands-on industry experience as a product designer
• Deep appreciation for craft and a portfolio demonstrating excellent visual, UI, and interactive skills
• A strategic mind that connects design work to business outcomes
• Comfort with prototyping or coding your ideas
• Experience working with AI-powered IDEs like Cursor or Bolt is a plus
• Excellent communication skills including spoken and written English
• Enthusiasm for  working on ambiguous problems, independently or with multiple stakeholders, and the ability to balance existing design standards with new AI paradigms
• Proven ability to ship high-quality products in a self-directed manner