Lead Product Builder, Product & Design

Location: NYC-based, or planning to spend significant time co‑located with the CEO in New York Compensation: Competitive startup comp and meaningful equity upside Department: Product Reports to: CEO Also posted as: Senior Product Manager · Lead Product Designer · Product Lead · Head of Product About Rare Candy Rare Candy is revolutionizing the $25 billion trading-card industry as the only community marketplace 100% dedicated to TCGs. Collectors use our AI-powered card scanner, data-rich collection tools, and jaw-dropping drops to buy, sell, rip, and showcase Pokémon, MTG, Lorcana, One Piece, and more. We've hit 10x revenue growth over the last 6 months, the business is highly profitable, and we're building the team to take this from a great product to a category-defining one. We're a 10-person team moving fast and looking for the next set of TCG-obsessed rock stars to join our team. The Role With AI, the line between product manager and product designer has collapsed. The most valuable person on a modern product team is someone who can own the entire arc of building: understanding the customer, framing the problem, defining the spec, designing the experience, prototyping it to high fidelity, testing it, and handing engineering something so clear it's a joy to build. Everything but shipping the production code. That's this role. Given the full-stack nature of the role, we’re excited to hear from candidates from PM, Design, and/or Engineering backgrounds. This is our first full-time product and design hire, and you'll own the function. You'll own product craft end-to-end: research, specs, prototypes, design, and the engineering handoff. The CEO owns the product vision and final prioritization and stays deeply involved in the work with you. This is a true partnership, not a hand-off. You should be excited about moving fast, learning quickly, and having a tremendous impact on the business and our users. This is a high-bar role, and we're willing to search for the right person. If you're a seasoned product builder who's energized by a hands-on founder, lives at the intersection of product and design, and genuinely loves trading cards, keep reading. What Success Looks Like First 30 days: You own and ship a medium-sized feature plus a few small but important refinements end-to-end, with less hand-holding each week. You also help set up and organize our two-month roadmap. By day 30, the CEO trusts you to own things and ship them right. First few months: You're running the full product-management function, including roadmap execution, specs, prioritization, and shipping cadence, so the day-to-day product engine hums without the CEO project-managing it. You're designing and prototyping real surfaces to high fidelity yourself. By the end of year one, you've shipped a body of high-impact work that moved our guiding metrics: weekly active users and new activated users. You've built the lightweight product process a fast-shipping team needs without bureaucratizing it, and you've earned the trust and shown the judgment to be on a credible path toward Head of Product. What You'll Do Own product end to end: from customer research and data to problem framing, to spec, to design, to high-fidelity prototype, to testing, to engineering handoff. The whole arc, everything but production code. Prototype to validate, not to ship: go straight to high-fidelity, interactive prototypes in Figma, Figma Make, Cursor, or whatever gets you there fastest, to pressure-test ideas and make engineering's job dramatically easier. The prototype is how we de-risk and communicate, not the thing that ships. Stay close to the customer and the numbers: fluent with both qualitative research and quantitative data. You tie every product decision to whether it moves active and new-user metrics. Partner with the CEO daily: you'll work closely framing up key decisions and strategy, building prototypes and working through feedback. You own the day-to-day output and will work collaboratively with the founders on prioritization and long-term strategy & vision. Collaborate across the team: work cleanly with engineering on handoff and build. Contract design support is available when you need it. Build the product muscle: establish just enough process to ship reliably and fast, and grow into the product leader of this company. A Day in Your Life at Rare Candy Morning: you check yesterday's metrics, notice a new surface is converting better than expected, and flag a refinement idea. You and the CEO jump on a 30-minute working session, trading prototypes on a feature for the home screen, and you've already mocked two directions in high fidelity overnight. Midday: you run a quick test of a flow with real collectors, then turn what you learned into a tighter spec. Afternoon: you walk engineering through an interactive prototype that answers the questions before they're asked, then spend an hour deep in research for next sprint's biggest bet. You Might Be a Fit If You've got 6 to 10 years of experience shipping high-quality consumer products, with a track record of high-impact work in high-velocity environments, ideally in an early-stage startup. We care far more about demonstrated ownership and impact than your exact years or titles. You're the rare hybrid: real product-management chops and an excellent taste for UX and design. You may have come from design, product, or even engineering, but you can flex into all of it, and you have a strong intuitive sense of user needs and polished, delightful product. You're fast and fluent with AI-powered prototyping tools (Figma, Claude Design, Cursor, etc), and you use them to get to high-fidelity, testable prototypes quickly. You're deeply customer-oriented and equally comfortable with data. You can conduct research, read a funnel, and balance customer needs against business needs. You operate with high agency and a bias to action. You take responsibility for your own growth and leverage, you move decisively, and you orient relentlessly toward impact that matters, not motion for its own sake. You're a high-trust, low-ego partner who's energized, not constrained, by working closely with a hands-on founder. You’re a true trading-card and collectibles nerd. You collect, you play, or you've got real fluency in the hobby, and you light up talking about sets, pulls, and the meta. Why Join Us Now Define the product of a category-defining collecting company, in partnership with a founder who's deep in the work with you. Be the first full-time product and design owner, with a clear path to Head of Product and the chance to shape how a modern AI-era product team is built. Work at the frontier: this role is a bet that AI can change how great products get built. You'll get to prove it. Competitive startup comp and meaningful equity upside. Full benefits: health, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k), and a wellness stipend. A monthly dogfooding budget to spend on cards, because we hire people who love this hobby. How We Hire and How to Apply The best signal is real work, so this process ends in a paid trial: a scoped, real-stakes engagement where we build together before either of us commits. Before that, we'll want to see and discuss the impact you've driven at past companies. Apply through our Ashby posting and answer these: Share two or three products you personally owned from problem framing through shipped impact or tested prototype. Include links where possible. Send portfolio links that show product thinking and UX or design craft, not just final screens. Share one spec, prototype, research synthesis, or handoff artifact that made engineering faster or clearer. Take a quick look at Rare Candy and one or two relevant competitors. Where's the biggest product opportunity to improve versus the market? Required: prove real trading-card fluency. What do you collect or play? What's your favorite era, set, card, or collector niche? And what's a sharp take you have on where the hobby is going? Rare Candy is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate individuality, from Pikachu collectors to Planeswalker pros, and are committed to building an inclusive team. #J-18808-Ljbffr Rare Candy