Senior Product Designer, Connect at Chess

Senior Product Designer, Connect

About Us: Chess.com is a global leader in online chess, boasting one of the largest gaming communities worldwide. As the number one platform for playing, learning, and enjoying chess, we are powered by a dedicated team of over 600 fully remote professionals spread across more than 60 countries. Our mission is to support over 250 million chess players globally with unparalleled products, content, and tools. We are a dynamic tech, gaming, and content company driven by passion and commitment to the game. We pride ourselves on a mission-driven, flat organizational structure, a life-celebrating ethos, and a no-corporate culture. We look forward to discovering what you can bring to our team.

About the Role

As a Senior Product Designer within the Connect team, you will take the lead in designing high-impact experiences for some of our most crucial and visible features. This includes key areas such as Home, Profile, Notifications, Widgets, Friends, Messages, and Sharing. Your role will involve extensive cross-functional collaboration, focusing on the intersections and overlaps between various features. You will partner closely with Product Managers, Engineers, and fellow Product Designers to craft a cohesive and engaging user experience across web, iOS, and Android platforms, reaching millions of players worldwide. Beyond the initial brief, you will identify new opportunities, influence critical product and design decisions, and continuously elevate the craft quality across the entire team.

About You

You are an experienced Product Designer with a strong command of visual craft, astute product judgment, and the confidence to significantly influence a product's direction. You possess a holistic perspective, considering how individual decisions impact the broader product experience. Comfortable navigating ambiguity and diverse viewpoints, you can articulate your thought process with clarity and composure, while also providing thoughtful, constructive critique to help your peers grow. You have a genuine interest in human connection and find joy in designing healthy and enjoyable ways for people to build relationships and feel integrated into a global community.

What You’ll Do

• Lead the complete end-to-end design process for high-impact product experiences across Chess.com’s web, iOS, and Android applications, delivering meticulously polished, production-ready UI designs.
• Collaborate intimately with Product, Engineering, Design, and other key stakeholders to define requirements, clarify complexities, and influence both product and design strategy.
• Design intuitive and engaging ways for players to connect, socialize, and foster a sense of belonging within a global community, focusing on core features such as Home, Profile, Friends, Messaging, Notifications, and Leaderboards.
• Maintain a horizontal perspective across features and the broader design system, actively identifying opportunities to enhance consistency, usability, and overall product quality.
• Elevate the craft standard through exceptional UI design, thoughtful interaction patterns, and sound product judgment, informed by context, design heuristics, and user insights.
• Proactively identify significant product opportunities that extend beyond the immediate project scope, guiding them from initial concept to well-articulated design direction.
• Present your design proposals with clarity, effectively articulating your decisions, navigating differing perspectives, and facilitating cross-functional alignment towards robust solutions.
• Develop and iterate on high-fidelity prototypes using our Design System, leveraging tools like Cursor and Claude, to efficiently explore design directions and accelerate decision-making.
• Actively contribute to design critiques, providing constructive feedback to other Product Designers, thereby strengthening the overall quality of the team's output without direct people management responsibilities.
• Maintain design ownership throughout the implementation phase, ensuring strong alignment between design specifications and the final code across all platforms.

Skills / Qualifications

• Minimum of 5 years of professional experience as a Product Designer working on a consumer-facing product or game.
• A compelling portfolio showcasing polished web and mobile UI design work that demonstrates excellent craft, strong product thinking, and a clear sense of accountability.
• Mastery of fundamental UI design principles, including typography, color theory, layout composition, visual hierarchy, alignment, contrast, interactivity, and user experience heuristics.
• Demonstrated experience utilizing agentic tools such as Cursor and Claude to construct shareable prototypes and efficiently iterate on design concepts.
• Proven track record of owning complex product initiatives from initial problem definition through successful implementation.
• Strong proficiency with design systems, including the ability to effectively use established patterns while also identifying opportunities for cross-feature consistency improvements.
• A history of successfully influencing product and design decisions, clearly presenting proposals, and effectively navigating cross-functional disagreements or competing priorities.
• Familiarity with frontend development processes and a clear understanding of how design translates into code across various web and mobile platforms.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, a proactive approach to remote collaboration, and the judgment to operate effectively with a high degree of autonomy and in ambiguous situations.

Preferred / Nice to Haves

• A passion for chess and a deep understanding of Chess.com's product experience.
• Prior experience designing social features for mobile games or consumer products.
• Experience with motion design, built upon a strong foundation of product and UI design craft.
• Background in design engineering or frontend development for web, iOS, or Android.

About the Opportunity

• This is a full-time position.
• We operate as a 100% remote company, allowing you to work from anywhere globally.
• This role welcomes applicants from around the world but requires a minimum of 3 hours of overlap with U.S. working hours.

You can learn more about us here: How Chess.com’s remote team works together

We look forward to meeting you! Apply now to join our creative remote team at Chess.com.