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

Role overview A leading local commerce platform is hiring a contract Principal Product Designer to translate a clearly defined brand strategy into tangible, product-level experience work. This is a hands-on, individual contributor engagement focused on shaping how the app expresses its identity across priority user flows. The designer will personally move the work from audit through prototypes and into live experimentation.

Responsibilities - Conduct an audit of the current product experience and surface the most strategically important gaps between brand intent and shipped behavior. - Translate high-level brand strategy into a concise set of product experience principles, frameworks, and artifacts that product and engineering teams can apply in practice. - Design a small number of strategically important end-to-end experiences in Figma, from early concept through engineering-ready hand-off. - Build testable hypotheses that link design decisions to user and business outcomes, then produce the prototypes needed to validate them. - Partner closely with UX Design and Consumer Product teammates to prototype, ship, and measure the work, contributing directly rather than delegating execution. - Create reusable interaction, visual, and content patterns that strengthen the broader product design system. - Assess the current design operating model and recommend the right long-term capability based on firsthand experience working within it.

Requirements - Senior, hands-on product design experience with a portfolio that shows shipped, customer-facing work, not just concept artifacts. - Strong craft in Figma, including systems thinking, interaction design, and production-ready specification work. - Demonstrated ability to bridge brand strategy and product design, turning abstract positioning into usable design principles and components. - Experience designing experiments and connecting design choices to qualitative and quantitative outcomes. - Comfort working as an embedded individual contributor alongside internal UX and product teams on short-to-medium engagements. - Ability to produce clear written and visual deliverables suitable for executive audiences and engineering partners alike.

Nice to have - Background in marketplace, consumer, or two-sided product surfaces. - Familiarity with local, trust-driven, or community-oriented product contexts.

Benefits and work setup - Contract engagement, with flexible classification available as either a 1099 independent contractor at an estimated $140–$165/hour or a W-2 contract employee at an estimated $100–$130/hour. - Final rate depends on experience, scope, and classification. - Fully remote-friendly execution is implied, with delivery expected against defined milestones rather than fixed hours.