Lead Product Designer, Marketplace at Circle

About Circle

Circle is at the forefront of building the world’s premier AI-powered, all-in-one platform tailored for digital businesses. This innovative platform empowers creators, coaches, educators, and various businesses to consolidate their audience engagement. It seamlessly integrates engaging discussions, live streams, events, chat functionalities, courses, and secure payment processing into a single, cohesive environment, all branded under the user's identity.

Proudly operating as a fully remote company, Circle boasts a diverse team of approximately 270 professionals (and continuously expanding) spanning over 30 countries worldwide. The company is dedicated to attracting exceptional talent globally, providing them with the resources and environment to perform at their peak, thereby enabling them to make significant impacts both professionally and personally. Circle emphasizes high expectations and results, rather than tracking hours, fostering a highly asynchronous and documented collaborative culture across various time zones.

To foster team cohesion and innovation, Circle organizes bi-annual company offsites in stunning international locations. Past offsite destinations have included Turkey, Portugal, Mexico, Thailand, Colombia, Italy, and Ireland, with more exciting locations planned for the future. Prospective candidates are encouraged to visit Circle’s Careers page for a deeper insight into the company culture and working environment.

About Discover

Individuals today seek more than just passive content consumption; they crave personal growth, meaningful connections, and transformative experiences that reshape their perspectives. Circle serves as the destination for such experiences, moving beyond platforms optimized solely for clicks and consumption. It is a space designed for personal evolution.

Discover is the pivotal interface through which Circle’s offerings become visible globally, acting as the primary channel where creators gain visibility and users find valuable experiences. This feature addresses a complex two-sided marketplace challenge encompassing communities, courses, events, and more. It represents one of the most intriguing and significant design challenges within the entire Circle platform.

About the Role: Lead Product Designer, Marketplace

As the Lead Product Designer for Discover, you will assume end-to-end ownership of the product area. Your responsibilities will include identifying strategic opportunities, defining the design direction, and delivering exceptional work that elevates the standard of discovery experiences at Circle. You will collaborate closely with a founder-led product team known for its strong vision and high standards. Your role will involve applying expert craft, systems thinking, and innovative bottom-up ideas to materialize this vision effectively.

Joining a design team characterized by open context sharing, genuine ownership, and trust in talented individuals, you will be empowered to produce your best work. This role is specifically tailored for designers possessing extensive experience in consumer marketplace products, particularly those with a proven track record in owning discovery, ranking, and engagement at scale. Candidates whose primary background lies in internal tools, CMS platforms, or growth systems are advised to consider the Core Product role instead, as this position would not be a suitable fit.

The Challenge: Designing AI-Driven Discovery for Marketplaces

Designing effective discovery experiences poses significant challenges, especially when catering to two distinct audiences with often opposing needs. On one side, creators require visibility, trust signals, and growth opportunities. On the other, consumers need to filter noise, gain confidence in their choices, and find experiences that genuinely deliver on their promise.

What distinguishes this particular challenge is the integration of AI as the fundamental interaction model - not merely a supplementary filter or recommendation widget, but the core mechanism through which Discover comprehends user intent and surfaces relevant, valuable experiences. Key questions arise: How does an AI-driven experience cultivate trust within a marketplace? How can an AI-powered interface feel like a personalized, trusted recommendation rather than an impersonal, algorithmically ranked list? These are profound, open-ended questions, and the quality of their solutions will directly manifest in the product's success and user satisfaction.

Key Responsibilities

• End-to-End Ownership: Take full ownership of Discover's design, from identifying opportunities and framing problems to setting design direction and shipping high-quality features. Connect dots across the entire platform, understanding how a community business compound product influences Discover's surfacing mechanisms, and integrate this systems understanding into every design decision.
• AI-Driven Design: Design intuitive and engaging AI-driven discovery experiences. Focus on conversational and relational UX, crafting interfaces, curation experiences, and trust signals that make AI discovery feel effortless. Build human-centric relationships between the platform, creators, and members, moving beyond purely algorithmic interactions.
• Marketplace Mastery: Apply a deep understanding of marketplace dynamics at a systems level. Recognize how creator visibility is earned, consumer confidence is built, and how even minor broken experiences can erode trust on both sides. Let this comprehensive understanding drive your design decisions, transcending mere surface-level execution.
• Rapid Prototyping: Leverage AI-assisted tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, v0, and Lovable to rapidly build and stress-test ideas. Maintain engagement with the problem space through to launch, collaborating closely with engineers to ensure concepts translate seamlessly into shipped experiences.
• Mentorship & Elevation: Elevate the craft standard within the Discover team through the excellence of your own work and by actively developing and mentoring fellow designers.

Required Qualifications

• Values Alignment: Strong alignment with Circle's core values, which are detailed on the company's career page.
• English Proficiency: Demonstrated proficiency in English (spoken, written, and reading) at a CEFR Level C2 / ILR Level 5.
• Marketplace Experience: Extensive experience in marketplace or two-sided platform design is a critical requirement. You must have designed for both sides of a market, understanding factors that build and break trust. Your portfolio should clearly demonstrate your ability to shape product outcomes, not just interfaces.
• Product Design Experience: A minimum of 5 years of product design experience, including shipping 0→1 products, complex multi-user flows, and clear evidence of driving product direction rather than merely executing it.
• Senior Leadership: Proven experience as the most senior designer within a product area, capable of setting direction, making strategic tradeoffs, and owning outcomes independently without constant oversight.
• AI-Assisted Prototyping Fluency: Genuine fluency in AI-assisted prototyping. You should be adept at building realistic prototypes using tools like Cursor, Claude Code, v0, or Lovable, viewing this as integral to your thought process and production workflow. Be prepared to articulate your process concretely.
• Figma Proficiency: High proficiency in Figma for high-fidelity design and seamless cross-functional collaboration.
• Proactive Communication: A proactive communication style; sharing your insights preemptively, surfacing decisions early, offering genuine opinions, and keeping your team informed without prompting. At Circle, effective communication is fundamental to building trust and ensuring successful project delivery.
• Ambiguity Tolerance: Comfort and effectiveness in designing within ambiguous environments. You should be able to build conviction through iterative processes rather than waiting for perfectly defined requirements.

Compensation and Benefits

This role is targeted at a Lead level; however, candidates with exceptional experience may be considered for a Senior level position, with compensation falling within the published range for either level.

Circle offers globally benchmarked compensation, competitive with US standards, along with equity in the company including ongoing refresh grants. Employees enjoy 35 days of paid time off annually. As a fully remote team, Circle fosters team connection through two annual company retreats held in inspiring global destinations.

In addition to significant flexibility and autonomy, Circle provides a comprehensive benefits package designed to support employee health, wellbeing, and professional development. Further details on benefits and the hiring process can be found in the Candidate Hub.