Senior Product Designer

Own the problems, not the tickets.\n\nSenior design roles often quietly shrink into review-and-approve: polish someone else's direction, unblock the team, keep the system tidy. This one is the opposite. You'll own hard product areas end-to-end, shape how a problem is framed before anyone opens a canvas, and set the craft bar the rest of the team designs to. Design here is a stakeholder in what gets built, not a service that makes it look good afterward.\n\nGetting there takes craft all the way down: the transitions, the states most teams never design for, the edge cases that ship right instead of looking broken. As a senior designer here, your work becomes the reference point for what good looks like, and you help every designer around you get there faster.\n\nTransform Education Through Design\nWe help schools increase their fundraising efficiency and keep their alumni communities active. As one of India's few profitable, bootstrapped SaaS companies, we're building lasting value for our team, customers, and the educational institutions we serve.\n\nOur Impact:\n- 6 million alumni connected\n- 500,000 students impacted\n- $10M+ in donations raised\n- 54 million engagement opportunities created\n- Profitable and bootstrapped since day one.\n\nThe Role\nYou'll join our 25-person product team (product, design, engineering, and quality)as the senior craft voice on a five-person design team, working alongside the design lead and three product designers.\n\nYou'll design for multiple audiences with distinct needs: advancement professionals, alumni, students, and administrators. Each brings a different level of technical comfort and an emotional relationship with their institution. The workflows are genuinely complex (fundraising campaigns, event management, alumni communities, data-heavy admin tools), and the bar is to make them feel simple.\n\nDesign at Almabase is a key stakeholder, not a service function. You'll shape how problems are framed before a single screen is drawn, push back with evidence, and own the direction of the product areas you work on.\n\nWhy we're hiring senior now\n- Complex product areas that need an owner: Permissions, integrations, and data-heavy workflows where the design decisions shape the product's direction, not just its surface.\n- We want to raise the bar with a senior systems thinker: Someone who sees how flows, the product, the business, and the design system connect, and whose judgment lifts the whole team's work, not just their own.\n- A real accessibility remit: Our customers include publicly funded US universities, and we back WCAG AA and VPATs contractually, so making accessibility a default in our system is genuine, resume-worthy work you'll help own.\n\nWhat You'll Own\nEnd-to-End Product Design: Own the complete design process, from problem framing to shipped product, for key product areas\nTake concepts to working prototypes in days using AI tooling, and validate with real users and data\nSet the craft benchmark: interaction, visual, and motion quality that others reference without being asked. Systems Thinking and Design System\nBring a systems lens to your work: how flows, data, the product, and the design system connect, so what you ship scales instead of adding one-offcomplexity\nSteward and evolve our design system (components, patterns, tokens, docs)as the layer that keeps designers, engineers, and AI tools all producing consistent output\nMake accessibility a built-in property of the system, with WCAG AA as the baseline\n\nTeam Leverage\nRaise the bar for the designers around you through pairing, critique, andproblem-framing sessions (craft leadership, not people management; no direct reports)\nBuild and share the AI workflows, prompts, and practices that make the whole team faster\n\nCross-Functional Influence\nPartner with PMs and engineers to define problems, not just solve them; bring user evidence into roadmap conversations\nDrive alignment through clear written artifacts, so decisions move fast and stay made\n\nWe're Looking For Someone Who\nFrames problems before drawing boxes\nThrives in complexity without creating it\nHas taste they can articulate\nBuilds, not just draws\nMultiplies the people around them\n\nYou'll Be a Great Fit If You\nWant ownership, not tickets: You're looking for a seat at the table where design shapes direction\nObsess over details: You sweat colors, typography, states, and edge cases, and you ship them right\nIterate relentlessly: The first version is a starting point; you keep improving based on what you learn\nLove the full lifecycle: Discovery, framing, building, shipping, and measuring what happened after\nTreat AI as a daily collaborator: It's already part of how you explore, prototype, and polish\n\nThis Role Is NOT For You If\nYou prefer pure strategy over hands-on craft (this role ships work, constantly)\nYou need designs handed off and never revisited (we iterate in the open, with engineers)\n\nRequired Experience & Skills\nExperience: 3 to 5 years or more designing software products, including end-to-end ownership of a product area at a B2B or SaaS company. We're looking for at least 3 years; beyond that, if your path doesn't match exactly but you can do this job, we'd still like to hear from you.\nCore capabilities:\nProduct judgment: A track record of shaping what got built, not just how it looked, with evidence you can walk us through\nSystems thinking: You see how the product, engineering, business, and the design system connect, and design for the whole, not just the screen in front of you\nDesign systems: Experience working with, and evolving, an established design system\nVisual and interaction craft: Polished, considered work across states, edge cases, and responsive contexts\nAccessibility: You treat accessibility as part of quality, and you're ready to help make WCAG AA a default in our system\nAI fluency: You integrate AI tools and code-assisted workflows into your own practice, and you can help others adopt them\nCommunication: You articulate design decisions clearly in writing and in rooms, and you're comfortable disagreeing with evidence\nGood to have:\nDeep accessibility experience: WCAG audits, remediation, or VPAT /compliance documentation\nFrontend familiarity (HTML/CSS or working in a real codebase with AI assistance)\nExperience mentoring or leveling up other designers\n\nSuccess Metrics\nYou'll know you're successful when:\nYour product areas are measurably better: adoption, task success, and support volume move because of decisions you made\nThe design system is healthier than you found it: better coverage, fewer inconsistencies, accessibility built in by default\nThe team is visibly faster and better: designers around you produce stronger work because of how you pair, critique, and share what you know.\n\nWhy Almabase?\nReal ownership: Design shapes direction here. You'll frame problems, challenge assumptions, and own outcomes, not execute tickets\nAI-forward by culture, not mandate: The team already works with AI tools daily(design, prototyping, research synthesis), and we invest in staying at the edge. You'll have room to tinker and the expectation to share what works\nMission-driven impact: Your design work directly enables educational institutions to better serve students and create opportunities\nSustainable business: Profitable and bootstrapped, focused on long-term value creation, with the stability that comes with it\nProfessional growth: A real leveling rubric, honest quarterly feedback, and a manager invested in your next orbit\n\nReady to Apply?\nWe'd love to see your work and understand your thinking. Please share:\nPortfolio with 1-2 case studies of complex B2B or workflow-heavy products: the problem, the constraints, the decisions and iterations, and what shipped. A grid of final screens won't tell us enough.\nAnything you've built: live prototypes, shipped AI-assisted work, or side projects that show how you think and build.\nYour answers to a few short questions in the application. They're the same for everyone, so we can review fairly and fast, and they tell us how you think