Core Product Designer

San Francisco, CA
Full-time
Visa Sponsorship

About the role

What You’ll Do

Own core surfaces.

Design and evolve the heart of the Candle experience. This includes the daily challenges, streaks, games, onboarding, discovery, notifications, and more.

Think in systems.

Craft emotional loops, streak mechanics, reward systems, and connection rituals that drive daily engagement.

Ship end-to-end.

From concept → prototype → polished UI → shipped feature. You’ll work directly with founders and engineers to bring ideas live fast.

Invent new formats, design to market

Design new interaction patterns for connection and marketing: collaborative canvases, async voice, micro-games, emotional check-ins, rituals, etc.

Obsess over details.

Typography, motion, haptics, micro-interactions, empty states, streak animations, the small things matter here a lot. Every pixel is questioned.

What We’re Looking For

  • 2+ years designing and shipping consumer mobile products
  • A portfolio that shows taste, restraint, and strong interaction thinking
  • Deep understanding of mobile UX patterns and emotional design
  • Strong Figma skills (components, systems, prototyping)
  • Ability to prototype interactive flows (bonus: React Native, SwiftUI, Framer, ProtoPie, etc.)
  • High product intuition, you can think like a PM when needed
  • You care about user psychology

Bonus if:

  • You’ve worked on social, gaming, or habit-forming products
  • You’ve built and shipped your own app
  • Have done animations with Rive

Why This Is Different

  • You’ll work directly with founders and exited founders (Apple, Twitter, NASA engineers, Forbes 30u30 )
  • Your work will be seen by hundreds of thousands within days
  • We ship fast, experiments go live weekly
  • We care deeply about emotional impact, not vanity metrics
  • You’ll help define the design language of a generational consumer brand

If you want to design something people use every single day with someone they love, this is that opportunity.

About Candle

Candle helps friends and couples grow closer daily in just 5 minutes.

Required skills

Prototyping
Figma

Other roles at Candle

Interested?

Let me introduce you to the founders.

Skip the process

Job details

Salary

$170,000 - $260,000

Equity

0.1% - 0.5%

Location

San Francisco, CA

Experience

1+ years

Company

NameCandle
IndustryConsumer
Team Size2

Funding

Last stage

Seed

Investors

Y Combinator

Founders

Parth Chopra

Parth Chopra

Co-Founder & CTO

LinkedIn
Alex Ruber

Alex Ruber

Co-Founder & CEO

LinkedIn

What happens next.

No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.

01

Confirm the fit

A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.

02

I pitch you to the company

I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.

03

A meeting lands on your calendar

If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.