POSTED May 25

Product Designer at Evil Martians

  • Design
  • Fulltime
  • Anywhere (100% Remote) Only
Job Description

Evil Martians are looking for a fully remote Product Designer for our distributed team. We provide work permits and relocation to Portugal or Japan. The salary shown is “gross” salary (before tax deductions).

Evil Martians prioritize developer experience, and humane, professional relations within the team. We offer a lot to our engineers, both professionally, and we also provide benefits beyond just compensation; here’s a quick rundown:

  • We prioritize engineering culture while achieving customer success. Martian designers and engineers help choose the most interesting projects. Product designers do not report directly to account managers, and account managers build professional, welcoming environments with clients.
  • We have many brilliant engineers. If you’re familiar with the open source world, you may recognize some names. We’d love to help you grow in the open source community, too. If you’re already experienced, there’s also lots of room for you to help our rising web development stars.
  • Evil Martians is an international company headquartered in New York. If you’re looking to relocate, we have offices in Portugal and Japan; we’ll help you make the move and provide work visas. Or, if you’re looking for a purely remote role, you’ll find a home in our globally-distributed team.
  • Martians have been fully remote for over 15 years. We know how to manage a distributed, asynchronous-first team without micromanagement.
  • The team comes first, even with business matters: for instance, all key business decisions are discussed openly and every team member can have an impact. Our finances are also made completely transparent for employees.
  • We can help you grow professionally, and amplify your voice: we’ll assist you applying for, practicing, traveling to, and giving talks at conferences. We’ll guide you writing articles for our blog (often appearing in prominent design newsletters and on websites like Hacker News).
  • For those working with us for several years, we offer (paid) sabbaticals of up to 3 months.
  • We have a revenue share model in place for the entire Martian team: every year, a portion of the company’s revenue can be distributed between employees.
  • Additionally, we offer medical insurance, English courses, reimbursements for hardware, and educational courses and materials.

Here’s why you should consider a career with us:

  • Evil Martians is a product development consultancy that works with startups and established businesses while also creating open source-based products and services. We’re a reliable product development partner, responsible for product development and engineering tasks from product roadmaps with measurable targets, design, release planning, iterative development, deployment and service reliability engineering.
  • Our clients are based in the USA and Europe. We work with series A/B global startups, Y Combinator alumni, as well as huge internet companies and enterprises launching spin-offs and “internal startups”. We can have a direct, positive effect on global products and engineering culture in these companies.
  • We’ve worked with giants like eBay, Gett, Groupon, and Fountain, developer tools like HTTPie, Akeero, and Teleport, and we’ve helped startups like Tines and Podium find success.
  • The Evil Martians Design Team takes pride in offering a place where passion and creativity are valued. If not busy with customer projects, we design open source tools like oklch.com (2nd Product of the Day on ProductHunt), create typefaces (like Martian Grotesk and Martian Mono, which were adopted by Google Docs), code plugins for Figma and Sketch, work with 3D rendering, and even build iOS apps (like Rememba, Recipe Scaler). We believe we’ve fostered an inspiring atmosphere for those ready to level up.

How a Martian Designer works:

  • At the start of a project, we adhere to a “Designer as Product Owner” approach and the MVP mindset. Together with a client, we shape or shrink the current scope by picking just a few of the most critical features that will deliver the essence of a product to potential users or investors—and we begin designing and helping engineers to build those. Our priority is shipping the MVP as quickly as possible to start collecting real data and getting user feedback.
  • Typically, on a customer project, a Martian team consists of one product designer, and one, a few, or many Martian Frontend and Backend Engineers, (or an in-house core team). And yes, our designer works with all of them proactively to check if design fits the project needs and requirements and finding ways to speed up development. Together with the customer and a Martian manager, we approve criteria for success and failure, explore analytics, and offer product hypotheses. Working with the project’s technical leader, our designer defines work scope, ships features, and accumulates and maintains a product knowledge base. With a Frontend Engineer, the designer helps elevate the user experience, and creates and develops a local design system.

We’re looking for designer colleagues with an engineering mindset. Most Martians can code—including founders, managers, and designers. Interest in how your design can actually be implemented, daily routine automation, and modern technologies is a minimum requirement for the job. We don’t force our designers to write code in projects (although they can still do it), but you could build a demo on Codepen or JSFiddle, commit edits to the project’s Git repository, or write a plugin that would help designers make their work easier or more efficient—this would be a big plus! We also highly appreciate it when designers summarize their knowledge and share it on our blog and at conferences.

What we’d like from you:

  • English communication skills; in particular, written English skills are a hard requirement, but if you’re lacking a bit with speaking skills, we can help you improve. In general, great English speaking skills, alongside a readiness to use it to communicate, ask questions, and show genuine interest in our projects and planning are a huge plus.
  • You’ll need to devote at least a few hours each day for communication with clients and teams that work in the following time zones: PST, EST, and CET.
  • Ability to work asynchronously: be able to document your ideas, questions and solutions, and self-manage planning, take proper ownership of your tasks, and deliver them on time. Additionally, you must communicate when things go wrong and make sure everyone is on the same page when plans change, and don’t hesitate to ask for help or come up with ideas to improve the development process.

How to apply

Please send an email to obey@evilmartians.com; put “Product Designer” and your name in the subject field.

We’re not interested in typical CVs or formal cover letters. Instead, drop us a line via email, telling your carrier story briefly: your experience, interests, previous projects, and your role in them (what did you do and manage to achieve, specifically).

Also, add one example of your work to your email. The case study format works perfectly: describe the initial task and problems you faced, how did you solve them, what did you create as a result—and why were you sure it was the best solution in that case.

Next steps:

  1. We carefully read your story and case study.
  2. An interview via Zoom. Important: we will NOT ask you to participate in stressful tests, nor do we ask lame, dated “puzzle” interview questions. We’re interested in your knowledge, experience and potential.
  3. A take-home test task. Usually, we ask candidates to design filters for a non-existing retail store. That’s because Evil Martians designers often work with complex user interfaces (like machine learning-based devtools, smart contract services, security apps) so with this test, we check your UX and UI skills.
  4. Final interview with Evil Martians’ CEO. 

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