Member of Design Staff

Highlight is building a shared intelligence layer for the modern workforce. Highlight unifies context across every person and tool on your team, seamlessly bridging information silos. It evolves with your organization to proactively route knowledge and reliably automate workflows.

The Role

We’re hiring a Member of Design Staff with technical skills to own visual craft and product design at Highlight.

You’ll help define how people interact with AI beyond chatboxes, and your work will be visible immediately in the product. If successful, your designs will be the reason people screenshot Highlight, share it, and talk about how innovative it feels.

You’ll take raw interaction ideas, half-formed concepts, and functional wireframes and turn them into interfaces that feel inevitable, futuristic, and obsessively polished. This role is about execution at the highest level: pixels, motion, transitions, hierarchy, and interaction details that make complex AI systems feel simple, powerful, and delightful. You’ll work directly with product, and engineering to bring new interaction models to life fast - often going from idea to high-fidelity prototype in hours, not weeks.

This is a hands-on role. You’ll design and prototype constantly, push the team toward higher taste and sharper decisions, and set the bar for what “great” looks like in AI-native software.

Note: this is an on-site role, requiring five days a week in our office.

Job Responsibilities

• Own visual and interaction quality across Highlight’s product

• Regularly talk to users, find creative solutions to their problems, and incorporate them into your designs

• Partner closely with the Head of Design to translate interaction concepts, product direction, and rough wireframes into confident, opinionated, high-fidelity UI

• Collaborate daily with engineers to bring polished interfaces, motion, and micro-interactions into production

• Rapidly prototype AI-native interaction models, through click dummys and in code, often moving from idea to testable prototype within hours

• Design and refine micro-interactions, animations, transitions, and layout systems that make complex AI behavior feel intuitive and delightful

• Push beyond existing UI conventions and help define new patterns for how users interact with AI systems

• Set and uphold a high bar for visual craft, consistency, and accessibility across the product

Profile

We’re looking for someone who wants to define what the AI user experience looks like next. We punch above our weight and expect extreme ownership, accountability, and proactiveness by default.

The ideal candidate is world-class at visual and interaction design, with deep experience designing desktop interfaces and a proven track record of shipping outstanding UI at scale. You obsess over pixels, motion, spacing, and clarity. You’re comfortable with ambiguity and turn half-formed ideas into confident, opinionated interfaces. You move fast without lowering the bar, and your work consistently shows exceptional craft.

You are a good fit if:

• You have shipped products users obsess over

• You are exceptional at turning rough interaction concepts and wireframes into polished, production-ready interfaces

• You can’t get enough of micro-interactions, animation, and interaction details that elevate the entire product

• You are deeply plugged into state-of-the-art UI and actively experiment beyond existing design conventions

• You’ve independently designed and shipped work at the level of the Dia (Mac) onboarding, Lapse (iOS), or corner maps (iOS). That level of craft and product judgment is the baseline for this role. Familiarity with work like this is expected.

• You can prototype advanced interactions quickly, and are either technical yourself or fluent with tools like Cursor or Claude Code to realize ideas without waiting on others

• You have experience with designing AI-native interaction patterns

• You send us your work and it clearly wows us

Additionally, you should have:

• Ownership mentality (no task is too small for you) - it’s all hands on deck here and we need everyone rowing the boat.

• Excellent communication skills and a collaborative mindset - we’re extremely lean so we’re looking for a team player who works well with others.

• Type-A tendencies: maybe you’re extremely detail-oriented. Or maybe you take pride in shipping high-quality products. Whatever it is you do, you give it your all.

• Must be based in or willing to relocate to San Francisco or NYC - although we’re flexible with days off & schedules, we have a 100% in-office culture during the week.

And even if you don’t fall neatly into any of these buckets, we’re looking for scrappy and motivated self-starters above all. Hustle is expected, grit is required.

Perks

• Competitive salary and generous equity package

• Health, dental, and vision insurance

• Flexible PTO and parental leave

• Paid team lunches during the week

• Relocation package