Staff Product Designer, Student Experience

About Handshake

Handshake is the career network built for the AI economy. With 20 million knowledge workers, 1,600 educational institutions, 1 million employers—including 100% of the Fortune 50—and every major AI lab trusting Handshake to power career discovery, hiring, and upskilling, we sit at the intersection of talent and opportunity at a pivotal moment in history. From freelance AI training gigs to first internships to full-time careers, Handshake is where professional journeys begin and evolve. That unique position is driving extraordinary growth: in 2025, we tripled our ARR at scale.

About the Role

As a Staff Product Designer on the Student Experience team at Handshake, you'll shape how millions of students discover jobs, build careers, and navigate one of the most consequential transitions in their lives. You'll own the end-to-end experience across job discovery and matching, resume building, interview prep, and long-term career planning — with a growing part of that experience powered by an AI agent that acts on a student's behalf, not just responds to their queries.

This team sits at the forefront of Handshake's product strategy. As a Staff Designer, you'll help define what great student career experiences look like at Handshake, bringing deep craft and systems thinking to everything from core flows to novel agentic interactions, while partnering closely with product, engineering, applied AI/research, data science, and career services experts to build products that millions of students rely on.

Your Role

• Partner closely with product, engineering, applied AI, data science, and content teams to define problems, shape product strategy, and deliver student experiences that feel genuinely helpful and trustworthy end to end.

• Own design end-to-end, from early concept through post-launch iteration: user flows, interaction patterns, prototypes, high-fidelity mocks, and collaboration through implementation.

• Design across the full arc of the student journey — job discovery, matching, application support, interview prep, and career pathing — including experiences where an AI agent takes meaningful action for students, not just surfaces information.

• Tackle novel, ambiguous design problems, including those at the frontier of agentic UX: how to represent agent reasoning, build appropriate trust and control, handle uncertainty, and hand off between AI and human judgment at the right moments.

• Rapidly iterate through wireframes, prototypes, and experiments to validate interaction models and optimize for real career outcomes — better job matches, stronger applications, faster placement.

• Partner with cross-functional teams to design and refine how new capabilities, including agentic features, are introduced, explained, and trusted by students.

• Obsess over craft, bringing a strong point of view on visual design, interaction design, and systems thinking while maintaining a relentless focus on student outcomes and wellbeing.

Your Experience

• 7+ years of product design experience, ideally building consumer-facing products at scale.

• A track record of owning complex, end-to-end product experiences — not just individual features or flows.

• Experience designing AI-powered or agentic products — systems that take action, make recommendations, or automate tasks on a user's behalf, not just conversational chat interfaces — is a strong plus.

• Strong communicator who clearly articulates design decisions, tradeoffs, user insights, and the thinking behind them to partners and leadership.

• Deep visual and interaction design expertise, with a proven track record of shipping high-quality experiences that drive measurable impact.

• Experience designing for trust, transparency, and control — helping users understand what a system is doing and why, and feel confident acting on its recommendations.

• Comfortable incorporating generative AI tools into the design process to accelerate ideation, prototyping, and iteration, while maintaining a high bar for product thinking, craft, and user experience.

• Comfortable using qualitative and quantitative insights to inform design decisions, evaluate experiments, and iterate quickly on emerging patterns.

• Highly collaborative. You value diverse perspectives and partner effectively across engineering, product, applied AI, data science, and career services experts.

• Design-led thinker who raises the bar by embedding design thinking into product development and helping others grow.

• Impact-driven. You prioritize ruthlessly and focus on the work that matters most for student career outcomes.

• Gritty and hands-on. You're willing to roll up your sleeves and take ownership — nothing is "someone else's problem."

• Deeply motivated by Handshake's mission and committed to helping students build meaningful careers in the AI economy.

• Curious and always learning, with a growth mindset — especially about how agentic AI is reshaping product design.

Bonus Points

• Experience designing agent-based or copilot products (career coaching, personal assistants, autonomous task agents, etc.).

• Familiarity with career services, higher education, recruiting, or early-career talent pipelines.

• Background in designing for high-stakes decisions where trust, explainability, and error recovery matter (finance, health, hiring).

• Passion for early-career professionals, the future of work, or the intersection of AI and human potential.

We Offer

Handshake delivers benefits that help you feel supported and thrive at work and in life.

The below benefits are for full-time US employees.

🎯 Ownership: Equity in a fast-growing company

💰 Financial Wellness: 401(k) match, competitive compensation, financial coaching

🍼 Family Support: Paid parental leave, fertility benefits, parental coaching

💝 Wellbeing: Medical, dental, and vision, mental health support, $500 wellness stipend

📚 Growth: $2,000 learning stipend, ongoing development

💻 Remote & Office: Internet, commuting, and free lunch/gym in our SF office

🏝 Time Off: Flexible PTO, 15 holidays + 2 flex days

🤝 Connection: Team outings & referral bonuses

Explore our mission, values, and comprehensive US benefits at joinhandshake.com/careers.