Principal Product Designer, Core at Chess

About Us

Chess.com is one of the world's largest gaming sites and the leading platform for playing, learning, and enjoying chess. We are a fully remote team of over 600 individuals spanning 60+ countries, dedicated to serving the global chess community. Our mission is to support over 250 million chess players worldwide with the best possible product, content, and tools. We are a tech, gaming, and content company driven by passion and commitment to the game. Above all, we value our mission-driven, flat, life-celebrating, no-corporate culture. We look forward to learning how you can contribute to our team.

About the Role

We are seeking a Principal Product Designer to enhance the core Chess.com experiences utilized by millions of players daily. In this role, you will help design and build critical features that define the online chess playing experience, including Gameplay, Puzzles, Bots, Learning, Leagues, Tournaments, and more. You will take ownership of significant problems, set a high bar for design craft, and deliver work that impacts a vast user base.

About You

You are an experienced Product Designer with a passion for games and crafting highly polished product experiences that foster connection and enjoyment. You possess a keen eye for UI and strong UX instincts, meticulously attending to details that make an interface intuitive and refined. You thoughtfully consider user experience and product decisions, and you excel at managing ambiguous design problems that span multiple features and cross-functional teams. You can seamlessly switch between refining a single interaction and understanding its impact on the overall product. You communicate your ideas clearly, elevate the standards of your peers, and take full ownership of your work from conception through implementation and beyond. If you identify an opportunity or a problem, you are proactive in addressing it.

What You’ll Do

• Own the design of core Chess.com product experiences.
• Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Copywriters, and leadership to collaboratively define problems and build effective product experiences.
• Design polished, intuitive interfaces for web and mobile platforms, utilizing Chess.com’s established design system.
• Present your design proposals and clearly articulate your decisions, supporting them with contextual rationale, heuristics, and user insights where applicable.
• Build interactive prototypes to effectively share and rapidly test ideas, leveraging agentic tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Figma Make.
• Own your projects from initial concept through to implementation, ensuring close design-to-code alignment throughout the development process.
• Identify and drive systemic design improvements, focusing not just on feature-level polish but on changes that enhance consistency, scalability, and overall product quality.
• Lead design critique sessions, mentor other designers, and consistently elevate the craft standards across the entire team.

What We’re Looking For

• 10+ years of experience designing consumer-facing products or games, ideally with a large, active user base.
• A portfolio showcasing your best design work, demonstrating expertise in interface and user experience design, including examples that influenced product direction or elevated a design team's output.
• Mastery of UI design fundamentals, including typography, color, layout, visual hierarchy, alignment, contrast, and interactivity.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills to effectively document and explain your design decisions.
• Ability to influence decisions across Product, Engineering, and leadership teams.
• A track record of teaching and applying these design standards at a team level.
• Proficiency in leveraging agentic tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Figma Make in your design process.
• A strong sense of ownership, pride, and responsibility for your craft.

Bonus Points For

• A genuine love for the game of Chess and in-depth knowledge of our product.
• Experience designing games or game-like consumer products.
• Examples of using motion and micro-interactions to add delight and elevate the product experience.
• Frontend or design engineering experience (web, iOS, or Android).
• Experience evolving or scaling a design system across a large product.

You can learn more about us here:

• How Chess.com's Virtual Team Works Together
• About Chess.com