Senior Product Designer (Seattle)

Job Description

Job Description

Senior Product Designer

*This is a full-time, hybrid role based in Seattle, with an expectation of working from our Seattle office at least one day per week.

To be considered for this role, please include a link to your product design portfolio with your application. You may include the link on your resume or add it in the Cover Letter field. A cover letter is not required.

About Housing Connector

Housing Connector is a tech-for-good nonprofit transforming how communities use the private housing market to address homelessness. We partner with property owners and managers to reduce barriers that prevent people from accessing housing, while providing the financial and resident support that gives housing providers confidence to open more homes to people who need them. 

Our model brings together property partners, community organizations, government, philanthropy, and technology to create simpler, more scalable pathways to housing. What started in Seattle in 2019 has grown into a multi-market organization with an ambitious vision: to deliver simple and scalable solutions until every person has a home. 

Position Overview

Housing Connector is seeking a Senior Product Designer to become our first dedicated design hire and help shape the next stage of our product and design practice.

Our platform serves three distinct audiences: renters navigating barriers to housing, community organizations helping people find and maintain housing, and property partners working to fill available homes. Designing for all three means solving complex, sometimes competing needs where the quality of the experience can have a direct impact on whether someone successfully finds housing.

This is an opportunity to build rather than inherit. You will lead product design across our platform, including customer-facing product surfaces, internal tools, and brand assets. As our first designer, you will have meaningful influence over both what our product experience becomes and how design is practiced at Housing Connector.

We’re looking for an experienced, hands-on product designer who is comfortable with ambiguity, brings strong product and design judgment, and wants to use that expertise on difficult problems with measurable real-world impact.

What You’ll Do

• Own end-to-end product design across our customer-facing products, from problem framing and user flows through interaction and visual design, implementation, and release, while ensuring a consistent and cohesive product experience.
• Build our design foundation, establishing reusable components, interaction patterns, and standards that create a more consistent experience across our products.
• Develop a deep understanding of our users through research, behavioral data, qualitative insights, and close partnership with teams who work with them.
• Partner closely with Product and Engineering to turn priority problems into thoughtful, feasible solutions, communicate design reasoning and tradeoffs, and ensure what ships reflect the intended experience.
• Bring strong design judgment, accessibility, and systems thinking to product decisions, helping the team make more evidence-driven decisions about what to build and improve.
• Design for people with varied needs and experiences, including differences in digital literacy, language, device access, and accessibility.

What Success Looks Like

Within your first year, you will have:

• Developed a strong understanding of our users and where our product experiences are helping or getting in their way. 
• Designed and shipped meaningful improvements that measurably improve engagement and use of our customer-facing products. 
• Established a scalable design system with reusable components and patterns that make our products more consistent and easier to evolve. 
• Established a strong Product-Design-Engineering partnership and a more evidence-driven approach to design decisions.

 

What You’ll Bring

• Demonstrated experience owning end-to-end product design for shipped software, from problem definition through release. 
• Strong product, interaction, and visual design skills, with the ability to move between systems thinking and detailed execution. 
• Experience using user research, qualitative insights, and product data to understand problems and inform design decisions. 
• Experience turning ambiguous problems into thoughtful solutions and clearly communicating your reasoning and tradeoffs. 
• Experience building or substantially extending a design system, component library, or reusable design framework. 
• Experience working directly and collaboratively with software engineers throughout the product development process. 
• Strong proficiency in Figma, including components, variants, auto layout, and interactive prototyping
• A portfolio demonstrating product thinking, interaction and visual design, and meaningful end-to-end ownership.

We’d Be Especially Interested If You Bring

• Experience designing two-sided or multi-sided products, complex workflows, operational platforms, or administrative tools. 
• Experience as an early or first designer who helped establish a design practice. 
• Experience designing accessible products for people with differing language, literacy, technology access, or accessibility needs.. 
• Experience in social impact, public sector, healthcare, housing, or another environment where product decisions can have meaningful consequences for users.

 

You do not need previous housing experience. You can learn our housing systems, partner landscape, internal systems, and impact model here.

What We Offer

Housing Connector offers a comprehensive benefits package designed to support employee well-being, equity, and professional growth, including:

• Comprehensive Health Coverage: Medical, dental, vision plans. We pay 100% of our employees’ premiums and 50% of their partners/dependents.
• Generous Paid Time Off: 22+ days PTO (in first year) and dedicated Community Service Leave.
• Extensive Holiday Schedule: Including a full week off in December.
• Paid Parental Leave:  Supportive leave options for families.
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP): Confidential resources for personal support.
• Life Insurance : Financial security for you and your loved ones.
• Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA, DCRA) : Health and dependent care expense accounts.
• 401(k) with Employer Match (6%) : Invest in your future.
• Professional Development Reimbursement : Annual reimbursement up to ($500) to enhance your skills.

 

Housing Connector is an inclusive equal opportunity employer committed to recruiting and retaining a diverse workforce and providing a work environment that is free from discrimination and harassment based upon any legally protected status or protected characteristic, including but not limited to an individual's sex, race, color, ethnicity, national origin, age, religion, disability, sexual orientation, veteran status, gender identity, or pregnancy.