Substack is building a new economic engine for culture, giving the brightest, most interesting, and most creative people on the internet the power of their own publishing platform. The terms of our culture should not be set by gate-keeping legacy media or chaos-fueling social media, but by the people who make and participate in that culture. Substack’s model, based on direct subscriptions, has fueled an explosion of independent publishing. It empowers creators with economic autonomy, creative ownership, and a direct connection to their most engaged audiences.
Product Design with Engineering Characteristics
Substack is looking for a Product Designer with —to borrow a phrase from an unlikely source— “engineering characteristics.” By this we mean someone with interest in and experience with the implementation of user interfaces in code, and especially someone capable and keen with LLMs and all the ways they can help design and development. What matters for this role is less mastery of a specific language, for example, than familiarity with software production processes and tools and the drive to go deeper. We’re a team looking to exploit LLMs to make our work faster and better; some of us are quite technical, some of us are absolute novices to development, and we’re interested in the full range of applications of LLMs, from prototyping to straight-up owning front-end.
Because the rate of change is so high, we don’t feel confident about the exact skills or experiences that will make for the best candidate, so rather than saying e.g. “must be able to build everything you design” or “must be proficient in” this or that language, we’re trusting that candidates who can
design products, features, and interfaces very ably, from complex web dashboards and flows to iOS and Android app and feed surfaces to smart televisions and so on; and
are ready and eager to discern how best to leverage LLMs for prototyping and production (and even pixel-fitting and bug-fixing) and capable of doing so quickly
will understand what we’re looking for and whether they’re the right fit to be successful here, as this team, like so many, adapts to the new landscape.
Design at Substack
Experienced designers know that commercial and economic realities shape the possibility spaces of product strategy. If success for a company means “selling more ads,” designers may achieve a lovely user interface or ideal typography, but everything will be in service of producing the same strange, often-nightmarish dynamics we all know from the many scaled platforms of the past decade.
Substack does not have silver bullets for the problems of human nature, and we will not avoid the costs of creating scaled platforms. But we do have a different model, one in which we make money only when creatives of all kinds earn money from audiences who value them enough to consistently pay them. Crucially, in this model, all scales are reduced: one needs thousands, not millions, of fans, and this difference alone changes the dynamics of the platform, and thus what’s possible with e.g. product architecture. As fundamental, though, is the level of trust and interest involved in paid subscriptions. “What works” for Substack is what leads people to make long-term and real investments in independent creatives and collectives, and we hope this will lead to improved outcomes in aggregate across many types of features.
If you’re interested in working on this model, we’d love to chat! Design at Substack is somewhat wild, and we’re looking for rigorous, robust, high-output designers who are comfortable with the vagaries and dynamism of startup life. We are not a “best practices” shop; we have very little fixed process; we work closely with executives and other functions and we’re not territorial or precious. But we get to shape the development of the most promising platform for creatives, we have a lovely and weird little team, and we have a lot of fun in our quite-free and friendly company. If this sounds compelling, hit us up!
Responsibilities
Rapidly build context about disparate product areas, community dynamics, and industry norms in any domains, from print media to podcasting to online social systems
Identify high-leverage opportunities for your team and help make their pursuit practicable through rigorous path-conception, batch-sizing, staging, and go to market planning
Design beautiful, usable, scalable interfaces and flows for a wide range of product zones (from profiles to CRM / analytics, publication aesthetics to moderation systems, email layouts to interactive content actions, and so much more)
Think holistically about the second-order effects on Substack as a product system; balance user groups, weigh trade-offs, and pragmatically find solutions which achieve the best outcomes possible given various constraints
Find ways to help creators and audiences build long-lasting, rewarding, and healthy relationships; empower audience members to become contributors and creators
Help diversify the kinds of creators Substack supports, through novel media type support, alternative reader experiences, supporting outreach programs, and more
Shape the culture and processes of Design at Substack
Requirements
All product design applications must link to or include a portfolio. This portfolio needn't be overly polished, although excellently presented work might stand out; our focus will above all be on whether you've demonstrated the capacity to craft design solutions in relevant or related product areas
3 years of experience designing software; we're especially keen to see experience with social networks; content networks; or content systems or products of various kinds; but any experience building software interfaces applies.
High degree of competence with Figma.
High tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity. Substack is still becoming a company, and much remains up for debate; everything from cycle plans to organizational structure to top-line strategy can change —and will— so a certain degree of adventurousness or heartiness is required, as it can all get rather messy!
Interest in both independence and collaboration. Sometimes, we must be team players; at other times, we must strike out to explore and find new areas of opportunity. You should be at least comfortable with both modes of operation. If you cannot abide sometimes being asked to act as a service designer, or you cannot work without someone guiding every decision, you will struggle.
Preferences
Technical abilities. While it’s not a requirement, we’ll be very excited to see candidates who can code. Specifically, we highly value strong front-end skills, experience making and deploying sites, and experience with TypeScript and React. We’re also of course very keen on candidates with SwiftUI capabilities. Current product designers with these skills use them often and to great effect, but we also appreciate that technical designers are “into software” as a whole.
We are also naturally interested in designers who’ve made use of LLMs to enhance their workflows in ways not related to product (for example with variation, prototyping, etc.)
Remember that these are preferences, not requirements.
SF Bay Area- or NYC-based. Living near our offices (in either city) means being able to work directly with colleagues, so it’s very slightly preferred. But most of us —including our Head of Design— are fully remote, and remote candidates shouldn’t feel discouraged from applying.
Substack’s compensation package includes a market-competitive salary, equity for all full-time roles, and exceptional benefits. Our cash compensation salary range for this role is $150K - $215K / year (USD). Multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, determine final offer amounts and may vary from the amounts listed above.
Substack is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or transgender status), age, national origin, veteran or disability status. We’re seeking people passionate about enabling independent expression and building a better business model for creators. If you want to see what media, communities, and content can become when unmoored from advertising models, and you have the skills and experience to contribute, we’d love to meet you.
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