Job Description
About Us
Within the next decade, investing will be decentralized, democratized, and community-driven. Syndicate is building the infrastructure to enable this at scaleโweโre developing decentralized investing and social networking protocols, advanced legal tech solutions, and a next-gen social networking platform that empowers communities to raise, coordinate, and invest capital like never before. Founded in Jan 2021, we've raised over $20M from values-aligned leaders who represent a diverse array of industries and communities, including firms like Andreessen Horowitz and its Cultural Leadership Fund, IDEO CoLab Ventures, Variant, Electric Capital, and over 200 others. We've also partnered with and received investment from over 100 community partners. Our first product allows anyone to start an investing syndicate on the Ethereum for just the cost of gas. The typical fees to set up an investing syndicate average $12,000 which allows us to be up toย 1,200x less expensiveย than traditional methods. We're using public blockchain technology to expand access to venture capital for entrepreneurs around the world because we believe that venture capital should be widely available rather than only accessible in a small handful of cities.
We're a Remote-First Company
We're proud to be a globally distributed company that's remote forever. Many companies have had to adopt remote work, but you could say we were born into it. That keeps things simple and efficientโyou can work from almost anywhere, without worrying about a commute, rigid schedule, or retrofitting old processes into new ways of working. Weโve built a top-notch remote culture that includes things like a home office stipend, travel reimbursement, and unlimited time off, regular in-person meetups around the world (including at least once a year where we fly the whole company out to a shared summit), and many more benefits to help you do your best work wherever you are. For most roles, we welcome applicants from anywhere in the world as long as the hours you choose overlap with the Pacific US timezone for meetings.
Diversity and Inclusion
At Syndicate, we're building a fundamentally revolutionary productโone that promises to democratize finance in a way never before attempted. That starts with a diverse, inclusive, affirming, and welcoming team. We are deeply committed to these principles as a core value, and proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. If you're a member of an underrepresented or marginalized group, we strongly encourage you to apply.
Design at Syndicate
There's probably no industry where design will have a bigger impact than in crypto. Crypto is a once-in-a-lifetime transformative technologyโthe kind that will soon impact every part of daily life. But itโs still like the early days of Silicon Valley: while the technology being built has an incredible potential to change the world, itโs still only accessible to highly technical base of early adopters. Combined with the fact that distributed applications areย uniquely positioned to become commoditized, design is uniquely positioned to drive what cryptoโand the worldโwill become. That makes design a key competitive advantage, and a core company culture, too. We're a design company as much as we're a crypto company. Our founders are alums of IDEO (the renowned design firm) and our first full-time employee was a designer. A core value held across the company is that it's not enough to build a great product from a technical perspective; it has to be accessible, understandable, and delightful too. At Syndicate, the design team impacts every part of the product and brand from the very earliest stages. We're a small, generalist team that's designing not only a product and brand, but also the design patterns and aesthetics that will come to define an entire industry. There's so much to design, we're all just getting started, and we hope you'll consider joining us.
The Role
We're looking for an experienced product designer to join our team to design key parts of our platform. As one of our first product designers, you'll have a huge impact in the earliest days of a fast-growing startup. Prior knowledge of crypto is a strong plus but not necessarily required for this roleโfor the right candidate, we can teach everything you need to know.
You will:
- Own design for large parts of our core product, working closely with others across the company to iterate quickly while upholding a high design quality bar
- Make data-backed decisions where possible by conducting user research, but yet be unafraid to trust your judgement and take risks, particularly in the absence of strong data
- Wear a lot of hats and get your hands dirty, moving from big, conceptual, strategic design challenges to more narrowly-defined tactical deliverables with ease
- Become a go-to expert in the technical constraints, user needs, business goals, industry landscape, and design best practices that shape our product
- Help shape the vision of design across the company, including in the design of our current and future products and our design team culture
- Help grow and improve the design team by mentoring others, contributing feedback, interviewing design candidates, structuring design processes, and more.
You may be a fit if you have:
- An exceptional portfolio of product design case studies demonstrating your skill across the full design stack, from big-picture strategy and research to interaction and visual design
- Experience designing products at early-stage startups with small, fast-paced teams of generalist designers. Years of experience isn't everything, but you probably have two or more years of experience in similar roles.
- Experience using and designing products in web3
- A strong systems-thinking mindset that enables you to simplify complex systems into easy-to-use products, backed by a desire to design conceptual solutions, not just usable UI
- Expertise in designing for responsive web
- A bias towards documentation and artifacts, especially interactive prototypes, as a way to present concepts. As a global remote company, we rely a lot on artifact-based communication over real-time meetings to maintain speed and clarity across time zones and languages.
- Strong communication skills, including at least professional proficiency in English (with more languages a plusโwe are a global company)
- Experience with current web technologies and basic proficiency with HTML, CSS, Javascript, and React is a plus as well