ProductDesigner

Substack is building a new economic engine for culture, giving the brightest, most interesting, and most creative people on the internet the power of their own publishing platform. The terms of our culture should not be set by gate-keeping legacy media or chaos-fueling social media, but by the people who make and participate in that culture. Substack’s model, based on direct subscriptions, has fueled an explosion of independent publishing. It empowers creators with economic autonomy, creative ownership, and a direct connection to their most engaged audiences. Product Design with Engineering Characteristics Substack is looking for a Product Designer with —to borrow a phrase from an unlikely source— “engineering characteristics.” By this we mean someone with interest in and experience with the implementation of user interfaces in code, and especially someone capable and keen with LLMs and all the ways they can help design and development. What matters for this role is less mastery of a specific language, for example, than familiarity with software production processes and tools and the drive to go deeper. We’re a team looking to exploit LLMs to make our work faster and better; some of us are quite technical, some of us are absolute novices to development, and we’re interested in the full range of applications of LLMs, from prototyping to straight-up owning front-end. Because the rate of change is so high, we don’t feel confident about the exact skills or experiences that will make for the best candidate, so rather than saying e.g. “must be able to build everything you design” or “must be proficient in” this or that language, we’re trusting that candidates who can - design products, features, and interfaces very ably, from complex web dashboards and flows to iOS and Android app and feed surfaces to smart televisions and so on; and - are ready and eager to discern how best to leverage LLMs for prototyping and production (and even pixel-fitting and bug-fixing) and capabl