Lead Product Designer - Discover (Marketplace & AI-Driven Experience)

About the role

You'll own Discover end-to-end as the lead designer: identifying opportunities, setting design direction, and shipping work that raises the bar for how discovery feels at Circle. You'll work closely with a founder-led product team that has strong vision and high standards — and you'll bring the craft, the systems thinking, and the bottom-up ideas that make that vision real.

You'll be joining a design team where context is shared openly, ownership is real, and talented people are trusted to do their best work.

This role is for designers with deep experience in consumer marketplace products — owning discovery, ranking, and engagement at scale; if your background is primarily in internal tools, CMS platforms, or growth systems, this role will not be a fit — please apply to our Core Product role instead.

The problem you'll be solving

Discovery is one of the hardest design problems. You're serving two audiences with opposing needs simultaneously: creators who need visibility, trust signals, and growth; and consumers who need signal through noise, confidence to commit, and experiences that deliver on their promise.

What makes this genuinely novel is AI as the core interaction model — not a filter or a recommendation widget, but the primary way Discover understands intent and surfaces what's worth someone's time. How does an AI-driven experience build trust in a marketplace? How do you make an AI-driven surface feel like a trusted recommendation from someone who knows you, not a ranked list from a system that doesn't? These are real open questions, and the quality of the answers will show up directly in the product.

What you'll be doing

• Own Discover's design end-to-end. Identify opportunities, frame problems, set design direction, and ship. You connect dots across the platform — understanding how a community business compound product feeds into what Discover surfaces — and you make that systems understanding visible in every design decision.
• Design AI-driven discovery experiences. The new world UX is conversational and relational. You'll design the interfaces, curation experiences, and trust signals that make AI-driven discovery feel effortless — building the relationship between the platform, creators, and members in ways that feel human, not algorithmic.
• Serve both sides of the market. You understand what makes a marketplace work at a systems level — how creator visibility gets earned, how consumer confidence gets built, how one broken experience erodes trust on both sides. That understanding drives your design decisions, not just your surface-level execution.
• Prototype at speed. You use AI-assisted tools — Cursor, Claude Code, v0, Lovable — because you've already figured out it's how ideas get stress-tested fast. You stay in the problem through to launch, working closely with engineers to close the gap between concept and shipped experience.
• Mentor and elevate. You raise the craft standard on Discover through the quality of your own work and how you develop designers alongside you.

What you'll need to be successful

• Strong alignment with our values, find our values on our career page if you haven’t read up on them yet
• You are proficient in English (spoken, written, and reading) at a CEFR Level C2 / ILR Level 5.
• Marketplace or two-sided platform experience — this is a hard requirement. You've designed for both sides of a market. You know what breaks trust and what builds it. Your portfolio shows you shaped outcomes, not just interfaces.
• 5+ years of product design experience, including shipped 0→1 work, complex multi-user flows, and clear evidence that you drove product direction — not just executed it.
• Experience as the most senior designer on a product area — setting direction, making tradeoffs, and owning outcomes without constant guidance.
• Genuine fluency with AI-assisted prototyping. You build realistic prototypes yourself using tools like Cursor, Claude Code, v0, or Lovable. This is how you think, not just how you produce. You can speak concretely about your process.
• Proficiency in Figma for high-fidelity design and cross-functional collaboration.
• Proactive communication. You share your thinking before you're asked, surface decisions early, give real opinions, and keep your team informed without being prompted. At Circle, communication is how trust gets built and work gets shipped.
• Comfort designing in ambiguity. Discover is still taking shape. You build conviction through iteration, not by waiting for perfect requirements.