Who we are
Workstream (www.workstream.us) transforms the way deskless workers work, starting from automating their hiring and onboarding workflows. We help companies to streamline the hiring process with workflow automation, SMS communication and machine learning. Our clients include Jamba Juice, McDonald's, Westin, Marriott, Uber, Subway, Dunkin', Panera Bread, Coupa Cafe, Sightglass Coffee, Equator Coffee and more.
We are a team from Stanford, MIT, Google, Y Combinator, Harvard, Cornell, Yelp, Qualtrics, Glassdoor, WeChat and more and are backed by investors including Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Charles River Ventures, Basis Set Ventures, CEO Zoom, CEO DoorDash, Peterson Ventures, Heartland Ventures, Jay Z, Joe Montana, James Harden, Chairman of Louis Vuitton, and more.
Global at our core, we are headquartered in San Francisco, and have presence in the US, Europe, China and Singapore from day one.
Culture is very important to us and we encourage you to read about our Values and see these resonate with you here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SHaeKG3IUy_1kE0y8FRnM8PPoEdMS0gmNIsSP3dG-3A/edit
The role
We are excited to welcome our first Head of Design (you!) to join our growing product team and build a delightful experience for our customers. This role will be based in SF Bay Area.
As the leader of the design team, you will drive the design vision of the product, and help build a empathy-driven culture across our product & engineering teams. Workstream is a domain-specific software (hiring for local businesses), and we look up to companies like Gusto and Intuit TurboTax which are able to provide an effortless solution to an otherwise complex problem.
You will start as an individual contributor, and build the dream team as we continue to scale. Currently on the team, we have ~10 engineers in Asia (China, HK, Singapore), 2 PMs in the US, and 1 designer in Ukraine. We are looking to double the team in the next few months, and we will look to you for guidance, leadership, and partnership in scaling the broader organization.
One of the biggest challenges we face today is being able to transfer the customer context to our engineering team overseas (they are employees, not contractors). A picture is worth a thousand words, and we see design as the linchpin in helping elevate the entire company’s empathy for customers and their pain points.
We are looking for someone who’s excited about the early startup journey, is a self-starter and have stellar work ethic, not afraid of working in chaos, and have a strong passion for solving user problems.
What you will be working on
- You will own large design initiatives end-to-end, from ideation and research to pixel-perfect execution for new and existing products and features.
- You will work simultaneously on some of the biggest problems (refactoring our product to focus more on roles such as Store Manager, Head of HR, and their use cases), as well as quick and dirty UI fixes.
- You will speak with customers closely, and help the entire product/design/engineering org build empathy for customers.
- You will play a large role in restructuring our design systems and information architecture, in a way that is more oriented around end-user roles, so we can build more tailored experiences based on each use case.
- You will work directly with our founding product management and engineering leads to build and ship the very best experiences that delight our users
- You will apply the full breadth of your design skill set through user research, UX design, and UI design
- You will be responsible for our design vision, strategy and initiatives for an experience that exceeds our customers' expectations
- You will act as a design and UX advocate for our employees, advising on design best practices and solutions
- You will partner with PMs, engineering leads, and founders to build out a design culture and influence innovation and execution.
- Over time, you will be responsible for hiring and building out a design team.
Your qualifications
- B.A/B.S. in Graphic Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Science, or a related field/equivalent experience
- 6+ years experience or equivalent experience designing digital products, with a experience in SaaS / SMB SaaS / B2B applications
- Experience in early stage startups, ideally having been with a company through the $1M to $100M ARR journey at least once, either as an IC or team lead.
- Experience hiring and managing a design team.
- Experience in working and collaborating with diverse teams in a dynamic, rapid growth environment — comfortable negotiating tradeoffs with product and engineering partners
- Experience in creating beautiful, high-fidelity mockups of your designs using Sketch, Figma or other modern design tools ready to be handed off to engineering
- Thoughtful communication skills and the ability to present design decisions and processes openly, clearly, and confidently
- An outstanding portfolio showcasing a foundation in solving business problems and design fundamentals
- Ideally, you have built a product or have been part of a product team that went from 0 to 1.
- You are tenacious, and won’t let a problem stand until you’ve figured out how to solve it (which may be at 2am in the morning).
- You are quick. Think on the order of minutes and hours, instead of days and weeks. We don’t have time to waste.
- Ability to act independently with a high degree of accuracy and reliability