Principal Product Designer, Core

We're hiring a Principal Product Designer to work on core Chess.com experiences used by millions of players every day. You will help design and build our most important features that define what it feels like to play chess online. Features like Gameplay, Puzzles, Bots, Learning, Leagues, Tournaments, and more. You'll own real problems, set a high bar for craft, and ship work that millions of people touch.

About You

You're an experienced Product Designer with a passion for games and designing highly-crafted product experiences that help people connect and have fun. You’ve got a sharp eye for UI and strong UX instincts. You sweat the details that make an interface feel intuitive and polished. You think hard about the user experience and product decisions behind them.

You love working on and managing ambiguous design problems that interweave cross-functional features and teams. You can zoom in to refine a single interaction and zoom out to see how your work shapes the whole product.

You communicate your thinking clearly, raise the bar for the people around you, and take full ownership of your work from start through implementation and beyond. If you see an opportunity or problem, you take it and run.

What You’ll Do

• Own the design of core Chess.com product experiences

• Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Copywriters, and leadership to help define the problem and build effective product experiences together

• Design polished, intuitive interfaces for web and mobile using Chess.com’s design system

• Present your design proposals and clearly articulate your decisions, backing them up with contextual rationale, heuristics, and user insights where possible

• Build interactive prototypes to share and quickly test ideas using agentic tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Figma Make

• Own your projects from initial concept through to implementation and help ensure design-to-code alignment throughout the process

• Identify and drive systemic design improvements. Not just feature-level polish, but changes that improve consistency, scalability, and quality across the entire product

• Lead design critique, mentor other designers, and consistently raise the craft bar across the whole team

What We’re Looking For

• 10+ years designing consumer-facing products or games, ideally with a large, active user base

• A portfolio of your best design work that demonstrates an expertise of interface and user experience design, including examples of work that influenced product direction or elevated a design team's output

• Mastery of UI design fundamentals including typography, color, layout, visual hierarchy, alignment, contrast, and interactivity

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills that allow you to document and explain your design decisions

• Ability to influence decisions across Product, Engineering, and leadership

• A track record of teaching and applying these standards at a team level

• Leveraging agentic tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Figma Make in your design process

• A sense of ownership, pride, and responsibility for your craft

Bonus Points For

• A love for the game of Chess and knowledge of our product

• Experience designing games or game-like consumer products

• Examples of using motion and micro-interactions that add delight and elevate the product

• Frontend or design engineering experience (web, iOS, or Android)

• Experience evolving or scaling a design system across a large product