Design Lead
About Pickle
Pickle is a peer-to-peer rental marketplace that unlocks the value of underutilized items in consumers' closets. It offers a convenient, dynamic local supply system for renting high-quality items, with a focus on accessibility rather than ownership. Pickle is now live nationwide and expanding into various local markets, including New York City, Los Angeles, and Miami. The platform currently features 400K+ items and continues to grow.
Pickle is committed to building a new kind of commerce layer that prioritizes access over ownership. Founded with a mission to revolutionize the way people shop, Pickle has raised $20M from leading investors and is rapidly scaling to meet the growing demand for its services.
About The Role
We are seeking a Design Lead with a background in consumer product design who is excited to dive deeper into the technical aspects of the business. You will be responsible for setting and defending the design bar across all surfaces of the Pickle platform, including the renter experience, the lender experience, the marketplace web experience, marketing, and new categories we plan to launch. You will also be part of a team that is transitioning to a Builder Model, where you will directly contribute to the product and ship changes without traditional handoffs.
What You'll Do
The Consumer Experience: Enhancing the overall user journey from discovery to repeat behavior, ensuring a seamless and enjoyable experience.
Design Vision & Direction: Establishing and maintaining a consistent visual, typographic, interactive, and motion design language across all platforms.
The Core Marketplace Experience: Designing core loops for renters and lenders, focusing on reducing friction points that impact transaction rates.
Mergansing & Browse: Optimizing the consumer shopping experience through effective inventory surfacing, editorial moments, and trust signals.
Brand Inside the Product: Ensuring the brand presence is consistent across all states of the app, from empty states to error states.
Hands-On Execution: Using Figma for exploratory design and working directly in code for implementation, tuning spacing, adjusting copy, and shipping polish passes.
AI-Native Design Workflow: Leveraging AI tools daily to accelerate exploration, generate variants, prototype in code, and scale output.
Requirements
5+ years of product design experience at consumer companies, with a track record of shipping consumer products at scale, particularly in marketplaces.
Strong instincts for consumer experiences, demonstrated through a point of view on how real people use consumer platforms and a portfolio that reflects this.
Demonstrated craft in visual design, typography, interaction, and motion, with the ability to articulate why your work is superior to the baseline.
Genuine excitement to get more technical, evidenced by your current use of AI coding tools like Cursor or Claude Code in your daily workflow and your readiness to ship changes directly in a codebase.
Comfortable reading and navigating a modern frontend stack, making small changes confidently and improving your skills monthly.
Willingness to operate in a Builder Model where handoffs are minimized, energized by this approach rather than frustrated by it.
Direct, low-ego, high-output communication style, giving real feedback, shipping quickly, and working closely with founders.
Based in NYC or willing to relocate for the in-office role.
Benefits
Competitive compensation + equity
Healthcare (Medical, Dental, Vision)
Take what you need paid time off
MealPal credits for lunch
Stipend to set up your workspace
Work directly with founders and leadership
Professional development + coaching
Pickle credits
Team events, offsites, and strong IRL culture
NYC office (Tribeca)
Compensation Range
$160K - $200K