Substack is hiring: Product Designer (Video) in San Francisco

Substack is building a new economic engine for culture, giving the brightest, most interesting and creative people on the internet the power of their own publishing platform. It empowers creators with financial autonomy, ownership and a direct connection to their communities.

We are looking for a Product Designer with experience and interest in video. As creatives of many varieties — writers, cooks, musicians, journalists, and everyone else — increasingly make use of video formats, Substack has introduced Live video, video podcast features, and video support across many surfaces.

An excellent candidate will have experience working on video products (e.g. players, production flows, editing interfaces, or the like) and/or on video itself, perhaps with a background in motion or animation design. This team tackles everything from “editing experiences” to “automatic LLM-based clip-making” to “captioning” to “formats” to “collaborative flows” to “watching experiences” and so on.

Design at Substack: Experienced designers know that commercial and economic realities shape the possibility spaces of product strategy. If success for a company means “selling more ads,” designers may achieve a lovely user interface or ideal typography, but everything will be in service of producing the same strange, often-nightmarish dynamics we all know from the many scaled platforms of the past decade.

Responsibilities

• Rapidly build context about disparate product areas, community dynamics, and industry norms in any domains, from print media to podcasting to online social systems
• Identify high-leverage opportunities for your team and help make their pursuit practicable through rigorous path-conception, batch-sizing, staging, and go to market planning
• Design beautiful, usable, scalable interfaces and flows for a wide range of product zones
• Think holistically about the second-order effects on Substack as a product system; balance user groups, weigh trade-offs, and pragmatically find solutions which achieve the best outcomes possible given various constraints
• Find ways to help creators and audiences build long-lasting, rewarding, and healthy relationships; empower audience members to become contributors and creators
• Help diversify the kinds of creators Substack supports, through novel media type support, alternative reader experiences, supporting outreach programs, and more
• Shape the culture and processes of Design at Substack

Requirements

• All product design applications must link to or include a portfolio.
• 3 years of experience designing software; we’re especially keen to see experience with social networks; content networks; or content systems or products of various kinds; but any experience building software interfaces applies.
• High degree of competence with Figma.
• High tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity.
• Interest in both independence and collaboration.

Preferences

• Technical abilities. While it’s not a requirement, we’ll be very excited to see candidates who can code.
• Living near our San Francisco HQ means being able to work directly with the CEO and our team in-office, so it’s preferred.

Substack is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or transgender status), age, national origin, veteran or disability status.