Principal Product Designer — UX/UI

Founded in 2015 by a dad of two, Bark is an online safety company that helps families protect their kids online and in real life. Over the past decade, we’ve transformed into the industry leader of safer tech for children, garnering recognition from TIME Magazine, Wired, The New York Times, Forbes, and countless other publications.

We’re at the forefront of the online safety revolution, designing and building smart devices that families need with parental controls that actually work. Our Bark Phone, Bark Watch, Bark Home, and Bark app are enabling today’s parents to help keep their kids safe like never before - and we’re just getting started.

Bark is also deeply committed to education and community impact. Through our Bark Community Partners program, we work with schools, nonprofits, and local organizations to provide online safety resources, training, tools, and safer technology to families and educators.

At the heart of Bark is our hard-working team of remote employees who are passionate about our mission. We care about our work, each other, and building a safer digital world each and every day.

Job Responsibilities:

You will be the lead designer on a small, senior Growth pod - you, an engineer, and a data analyst - reporting directly to the Chief Growth Officer. The pod's job is to ship experiments and UX improvements at high velocity across both the parent-facing app and the child-facing experience.

This is not a features role, and it is not measured in mockups shipped. You will be held accountable to one KPI:retention across our Bark Phone, Bark Watch, and Bark App install base.

• Own retention as a design problem. Diagnose where subscribers lose momentum, disengage, or churn across the Bark Phone, Bark Watch, and Bark App, and design the changes that keep them getting value.
• Lead the ground-up redesign of Bark's app experience. Incremental testing alone won't fix a product that customers find unintuitive. You'll own a larger overhaul of the parent and child app UI - setting a clear, opinionated point of view on what "intuitive" looks like for Bark, sequencing the work into shippable phases, and organizing the pod to deliver it without stalling the experiment engine. This demands strong taste, sound judgment about what to change and what to leave alone, and the ability to turn a big vision into an execution plan others can rally behind.
• Run a high-velocity experiment engine with your engineer and analyst - framing hypotheses ("if we do X, retention metric Y improves by Z"), designing the variants, and shipping A/B and multivariate tests continuously. Most experiments won't win; the point is to learn fast and compound the wins.
• Design for two very different users. The parent-facing app (setup, alerts, controls, insight) and the child-facing experience have different needs, literacy levels, and constraints. You'll design for both.
• Partner with your analyst on metric definitions - agreeing up front on what "retention" means for each surface, what a leading indicator looks like, and how you'll know a test truly moved the number versus noise.
• Turn qualitative signal into design bets. Mine customer feedback, support themes, usability tests, NPS, and surveys to find the friction that's actually costing you retention, and prioritize ruthlessly.
• Design age-appropriate, safety-first experiences for kids. Because you design the child-facing surface, you'll build with children's needs and privacy in mind - age-appropriate language and interactions, and data practices consistent with COPPA and children's-privacy expectations. You'll partner with Legal/Trust & Safety to keep experiments on the right side of the line.
• Work within and improve the design system. Leverage existing components, and give structured feedback where the system doesn't yet serve growth needs.
• Report retention impact monthly to the Chief Growth Officer and the wider company - what you tested, what you learned, what moved the metric, and what's next.
• Design in Figma at high fidelity and iterate daily based on data and cross-functional review.

Requirements:

• 7+ years of product design experience, with a strong record on consumer or subscription mobile products.
• Demonstrable experience designing specifically to drive retention - not just engagement or conversion, and not features for their own sake. This is the single most important requirement, and we will dig into it
• Fluency in experimentation. You've lived in a rapid A/B testing environment, you think in hypotheses, and you're comfortable pivoting based on performance data. You know most experiments fail - in well-run programs only about a third of tested ideas actually improve the metric they targeted - and you treat that as the operating model, not a setback.
• Comfort partnering with data. You can sit with an analyst, argue about metric definitions, read a cohort chart, and know when a result is real.
• Range across audiences. Experience designing for distinct user types; designing for children/teens is a strong plus.
• Advanced proficiency in Figma and modern design/prototyping workflows.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills for a tight pod and cross-functional work with engineering, data, marketing, and design leadership.
• A systems-minded, self-directed operator who can create clarity in ambiguity and doesn't need a roadmap handed to them.
• Bachelor's degree in Design or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Benefits:

• Competitive compensation commensurate with experience
• Equity stake in Bark
• Paid time off
• Paid sick time
• Health Benefits:
• • Medical
  • Dental
  • Vision
  • Healthcare Support
  • On-Demand Primary Care
  • Online Mental Health Therapy
  • Flexible Spending Account (FSA)
  • Supplemental Life Insurance
  • 401(k)
  • Voluntary Long-term and Short-term Disability Insurance

We recognize people come with a wealth of experience and talent beyond just the technical requirements of a job. If your experience is close to what you see listed here, please consider applying. Diversity of experience and skills combined with passion is a key to innovation and excellence. We encourage people from all backgrounds to apply to our positions. Please let us know if you require accommodations during the interview process.

Bark is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.