Principal Designer

Cord

Cord

Design
London, UK
Posted on Nov 17, 2023
tl;dr: Cord — a way to collaborate in any SaaS tool — is hiring a Principal Designer. Come and join our friendly team of tech veterans, and design the future of collaboration at work. We pay well and won't burn you out. Details below.
Who is Cord?
Cord is a team of veteran engineers, designers, and product leaders from companies like Facebook, Google, Adobe and others, that brings the power of collaboration to every app. We’ve loved working together in products like Figma and Notion, and believe the rest of the internet should feel like that: connected, collaborative, multiplayer.
Our tools shape how we work, and at Cord we’re building out a massive vision: connecting teams across all of their tools, letting them collaborate in context, staying in flow and enjoying powerful, rich modes of communication and productivity. At the same time, we enable SaaS vendors plug in a platform that solves collaboration for them in the best way possible, letting them focus on the unique value they add instead of chasing to reinvent chat.
Cord was founded by an early Facebook engineer and a PM from one of Facebook’s acquisitions. It’s backed by the world’s top investors, who’ve built multi-billion $ companies and led the early investments in companies like Slack, Notion, Figma, Stripe, Robinhood and others. They believe our mission to make collaboration at work more effective will create the next exciting brand and make a dent in how teams accomplish things together, and they’re in it to help us do that. You can listen to some of their thoughts here: Index, NFX x Elad Gil, Harry Stebbings x Jeff Morris Jr., Lars Rasmussen and others. We have the runway and their tailwinds to go after this and swing beyond the fences.
But we want to build this the right way: We’re a friendly team of grownups who’ve done this before, and are in it for the long haul. We want to create an opportunity for all of us to do the best work of our lives. We want to create with like-minded, passionate tinkerers and product craftspeople. And we want to build the company that mixes the best from all the cultures we worked in: Transparent, egalitarian, supportive. In our experience, success and fulfilment comes from focus, quality tools, deliberation and honing your craft - not from thrash, arbitrary deadlines and all-nighters. You can check out some of the team testimonials on Glassdoor (Hardly any threats were used to extract these.)
What’s the Opportunity?
We’re looking for a Principal Designer to shape the look, feel, and usability of our product.
This is one of those rare opportunities where thoughtful design truly will make the difference. Cord will succeed or fail based on the quality of our users’ experience. As one of the key members of this discipline, you’ll be able to help us shape our approach and culture. This is something we’re committed to investing in, enabling you to bring great ideas to life.
This role is ideal for someone who wants to go early stage, with all the opportunity and scope that brings. If you ever want to start your own business and learn what it’s like to be involved in a rapid growth, early stage startup - this is the role and the stage to join.

What will I be doing?

  • Owning and driving large projects from product thinking through to overseeing implementation.
  • Working cross-functionally with engineering. You'll spend a lot of time thinking through ideas, possibilities, and constraints; and will be relied on to give and receive thoughtful feedback.
  • Building on our design system and making it your own. We're new and what we have is being iterated on very quickly.
  • You'll be the sole designer on a team that recognizes the intrinsic value of design thinking and sees it as integral to building software.
  • We work in Figma, but aside from that you're free to bring a process and set of tools that suits you. Like prototyping in Framer? Great! Give a tech talk to the team on it.

What can I bring?

  • Meaningful experience in a startup or tech company, where your designs have been built, shipped, and iterated on, ideally as a founding designer.
  • A portfolio of work showing your product design skills, and (importantly!) the thinking behind your work. Why did you do it a certain way? What were the constraints, the trade-offs, and the alternatives? If it was a big project, what was your role specifically?
  • A desire to work in an early stage environment, with all the scope and ambiguity that brings.
  • You don't need to code, but you understand the basic principles of how modern web apps are built.

What can you offer me?

  • A very competitive salary and early-stage stock options
  • Best available private health and dental cover for you and dependents
  • Uncapped PTO
  • A parent-friendly culture
  • Whatever equipment you need
  • Local (Shoreditch, London) - Tue-Thu in office and Mon, Fri work from home. A thoughtful, focused culture minimizing unnecessary meetings.
  • You can become an expert in the fundamentals of customer engineering from scratch and into scale. You will have support and guidance from our team of veteran operators with multiple exits and experiences in key positions at $1B+ companies behind them.
  • What else? We’re new, shape it with us!
Please submit a link to your portfolio with your CV.