Principal Product Designer, Brand and Experience (Contract, Hands-On)

OfferUp believes all value starts local. Our marketplace makes it easier for people and businesses to find more of what they need, right where they are—from great deals and secondhand finds to local services, rentals, jobs, and new customers.

We’re building the next chapter of OfferUp, and Consumer Marketing has an important job to do: create future demand, capture existing demand efficiently, reactivate people who already know us, and connect our investment to our strongest local marketplaces.

OfferUp is evolving from a highly transactional local marketplace into a broader platform connecting people with valuable opportunities around them.

We have a clear brand vision built around local possibility, usefulness, trust and human connection. That vision is not yet consistently expressed in the product experience. The app is functional and familiar, but key surfaces can feel generic, visually undifferentiated and more transactional than the larger OfferUp promise.

We are looking for a senior, hands-on product design leader to help us determine how a more distinctive, locally relevant and brand-informed experience can improve user comprehension, activation, trust and return behavior.

The Role
The Fractional Principal Product Designer will be personally designing and building this work.  This is an individual-contributor, hands-on-keyboard role, not a direction-setting or oversight-only position.

• Translate OfferUp's brand strategy into practical product-experience principles, and design the frameworks and artifacts that make those principles usable by product and engineering.
• Identify the highest-value opportunities to make the product more comprehensible, locally relevant, trustworthy and recognizably OfferUp.
• Design a small number of strategically important user experiences in Figma from concept through engineering-ready hand-off. 
• Develop testable hypotheses connecting design decisions to user and business outcomes, and build the prototypes needed to test them.
• Partner closely with UX Design and Consumer Product teams to prototype, validate, ship and measure the work — hands-on for the core design deliverables, not delegating execution.
• Build reusable interaction, visual and content patterns — component-level design work — that strengthen the broader product design system.
• Assess the design operating model and recommend the appropriate long-term capability, informed by direct hands-on experience building within the current structure.

By the end of the engagement, the designer will have produced:

• An audit of the current experience and its most important strategic gaps.
• A concise set of product-experience principles translating the OfferUp brand into product behavior and design.
• Clearly articulated user and business hypotheses for the priority experiences.
• Validated prototypes for two strategically significant areas.
• At least one experience advanced into a live experiment, phased release or engineering implementation.
• Implementation-ready designs and specifications for agreed-upon work.
• Reusable product design patterns and recommendations for the product design system.
• A measurement readout covering qualitative findings, near-term behavioral results and longer-term measures to continue tracking.

Success will not be evaluated on aesthetic preference alone. Depending on the selected experiences, measures may include:

• Faster time to first meaningful value.
• Improved comprehension of OfferUp’s value and available use cases.
• Increased completion of activation behaviors such as search, save, message, profile setup or listing.
• Greater engagement with locally relevant content and categories.
• Improved comprehension and use of identity and trust signals.
• Improved D7 or D30 qualified return behavior.
• Strong qualitative improvements in perceived usefulness, ease, trust, relevance and visual appeal.
• Adoption of reusable experience principles and patterns by the existing teams.

Existing engagement metrics will be treated as important guardrails. The team will also evaluate broader and longer-term user outcomes so that promising experience changes are not judged solely by immediate click behavior.

The right person will be expected to work as both an originator and collaborator.

They must be able to:

• Move comfortably from strategy to detailed interface design.
• Produce exceptional work personally rather than only directing others.
• Explain the user and business reasoning behind design decisions.
• Collaborate with quantitatively oriented product partners without reducing every decision to local optimization.
• Design, execute, and leverage user research and experimentation to strengthen judgment.
• Work within technical constraints while identifying where those constraints should be challenged.
• Build alignment across Product, Marketing/Brand, UX, and Engineering.
• Raise the quality of the existing team through critique, modeling and practical systems.

We are looking for someone with:

• Significant experience designing beloved consumer mobile products at scale.
• A portfolio showing both strong interaction design and sophisticated visual judgment.
• Demonstrated ability to translate a brand or product strategy into an end-to-end digital experience.
• Experience improving discovery, marketplace, commerce, social, community or local products.
• Fluency in experimentation, behavioral metrics and qualitative research.
• Experience creating or evolving product design systems.
• The executive communication skills to influence senior Product and business leaders.
• Comfort entering an established product with meaningful legacy behavior, technical constraints and deeply monitored performance metrics.
• Experience acting as a Principal Designer, Design Director, Head of Product Design or equivalent hands-on design leader.

The goal is to determine whether more distinctive experience design can create measurable value for OfferUp—and to leave behind both improved product experiences and a more durable way of producing them.

Compensation: 

Compensation is structured as an hourly contract rate to reflect the fractional, non-benefits-eligible nature of this role. This role is not eligible for health benefits, paid time off, retirement contributions, bonus, commission, or equity.

We are open to candidates under either engagement type below. Ranges reflect a good-faith estimate of what we reasonably expect to pay for this role based on classification:

• 1099 Independent Contractor: $140–$165/hr
• W-2 Contract Employee: $100–$130/hr

Final rate will depend on experience, scope, and classification selected at hire.