Product Designer
About the Role
At Pod Network, you own the product layer across everything we ship: trading interfaces, explorers, onboarding, wallets, leaderboards, dashboards, homepages, and whatever comes next. This is a product role first. You'll talk to users, work out what's worth building, and get it far enough - a prototype, a first mockup, a rough working version - that the rest of the team can take it the last mile. You're the one holding the vision for how Pod Network's products should feel.
You should be obsessed with good product. You notice when something feels off, you have opinions about how it should work, and you actually want to use the things you build. You're AI-native: you reach for tools like Claude to prototype, mock things up, and make quick changes in the codebase without waiting on anyone.
Responsibilities
Own Pod Network's product surfaces. You hold the vision for how each one should work and feel, from first idea through launch.
Do the product work: talk to traders, learn how they actually use the product, and decide what's worth building.
Prototype quickly, using AI tools, no-code, or rough builds to turn an idea into something people can react to.
Set the design direction: come up with the first mockups, gather inspiration and references, and give our external design team a strong starting point. Push their work to be sharper, and help take our designs to the next level.
Jump into the codebase to make small changes, try things out, and tweak the experience. You don't need to ship production features, but you should be comfortable getting your hands dirty.
Find the rough edges in how people use Pod and fix or flag them, often before anyone asks.
Work with protocol and backend engineers on what the product needs from the API and SDK.
Set the bar for what a good product feels like here.
Qualifications
Must-haves:
Strong product sense. You can take a vague problem, figure out what users need, and decide what to build.
An eye for design. You can produce the first mockups and a clear direction, and work with designers to push the quality higher, even if you're not the one doing the polished production work.
Comfortable in a codebase. You can prototype, make small changes, and play around, even if you're not shipping production features. Some familiarity with TypeScript and React helps.
You understand trading products and how people use them.
AI-native. You use AI tools to move faster across research, prototyping, design, and code.
A track record of shipping real products that real people use.
Nice-to-haves:
Built a trading or financial app, especially one with live data.
Crypto or DeFi experience.
Product management experience.
What We Offer
The whole product layer of a novel layer-1 to own.
Competitive salary and equity.
A small, senior team that ships fast.
Travel and visibility in the crypto community.
About Pod Network
We are building Pod Network, a Layer-1 for open markets. Orders clear in frequent batch auctions, so the best price wins, not the fastest connection. Anyone can launch a market, its rules enforced by code, and anyone, anywhere can trade on it 24/7. We are backed by a16z crypto, 1kx, BBF, and Lemniscap.