Principal Product Designer, Brand and Experience (Contract, Hands-On)

OfferUp is evolving from a highly transactional local marketplace into a broader platform connecting people with valuable opportunities around them. We are looking for a senior, hands-on product design leader to help us determine how a more distinctive, locally relevant and brand-informed experience can improve user comprehension, activation, trust and return behavior.

The Role The Fractional Principal Product Designer will be personally designing and building this work. This is an individual-contributor, hands-on-keyboard role, not a direction-setting or oversight-only position.

• Translate OfferUp's brand strategy into practical product-experience principles, and design the frameworks and artifacts that make those principles usable by product and engineering.
• Identify the highest-value opportunities to make the product more comprehensible, locally relevant, trustworthy and recognizably OfferUp.
• Design a small number of strategically important user experiences in Figma from concept through engineering-ready hand-off.
• Develop testable hypotheses connecting design decisions to user and business outcomes, and build the prototypes needed to test them.
• Partner closely with UX Design and Consumer Product teams to prototype, validate, ship and measure the work , hands-on for the core design deliverables, not delegating execution.
• Build reusable interaction, visual and content patterns , component-level design work , that strengthen the broader product design system.
• Assess the design operating model and recommend the appropriate long-term capability, informed by direct hands-on experience building within the current structure.

Expected deliverables By the end of the engagement, the designer will have produced:

• An audit of the current experience and its most important strategic gaps.
• A concise set of product-experience principles translating the OfferUp brand into product behavior and design.
• Clearly articulated user and business hypotheses for the priority experiences.
• Validated prototypes for two strategically significant areas.
• At least one experience advanced into a live experiment, phased release or engineering implementation.
• Implementation-ready designs and specifications for agreed-upon work.
• Reusable product design patterns and recommendations for the product design system.
• A measurement readout covering qualitative findings, near-term behavioral results and longer-term measures to continue tracking.

Measures of success Success will not be evaluated on aesthetic preference alone. Depending on the selected experiences, measures may include:

• Faster time to first meaningful value.
• Improved comprehension of OfferUp’s value and available use cases.
• Increased completion of activation behaviors such as search, save, message, profile setup or listing.
• Greater engagement with locally relevant content and categories.
• Improved comprehension and use of identity and trust signals.
• Improved D7 or D30 qualified return behavior.
• Strong qualitative improvements in perceived usefulness, ease, trust, relevance and visual appeal.
• Adoption of reusable experience principles and patterns by the existing teams.

Operating approach The right person will be expected to work as both an originator and collaborator.

• Move comfortably from strategy to detailed interface design.
• Produce exceptional work personally rather than only directing others.
• Explain the user and business reasoning behind design decisions.
• Collaborate with quantitatively oriented product partners without reducing every decision to local optimization.
• Design, execute, and leverage user research and experimentation to strengthen judgment.
• Work within technical constraints while identifying where those constraints should be challenged.
• Build alignment across Product, Marketing/Brand, UX, and Engineering.
• Raise the quality of the existing team through critique, modeling and practical systems.

Ideal background We are looking for someone with:

• Significant experience designing beloved consumer mobile products at scale.
• A portfolio showing both strong interaction design and sophisticated visual judgment.
• Demonstrated ability to translate a brand or product strategy into an end-to-end digital experience.
• Experience improving discovery, marketplace, commerce, social, community or local products.
• Fluency in experimentation, behavioral metrics and qualitative research.
• Experience creating or evolving product design systems.
• The executive communication skills to influence senior Product and business leaders.
• Comfort entering an established product with meaningful legacy behavior, technical constraints and deeply monitored performance metrics.
• Experience acting as a Principal Designer, Design Director, Head of Product Design or equivalent hands-on design leader.

Compensation Compensation is structured as an hourly contract rate to reflect the fractional, non-benefits-eligible nature of this role. This role is not eligible for health benefits, paid time off, retirement contributions, bonus, commission, or equity.

• 1099 Independent Contractor: $140–$165/hr
• W-2 Contract Employee: $100–$130/hr