Senior UX Designer – Consumer Shopping Product @Designstream

Part shopper, part user experience designer and part ux researcher. 100% user obsessed.

• Contract (3-month trial period)
• Remote | Required overlap with PST & EST | Occasional late-day availability (~6pm ET)
• $4K - $6K /mo.
• Only Latam

About the Opportunity

Designstream is hiring a Senior UX Designer to join a US-based seed-stage startup building a next-generation shopping assistant — a consumer product that helps people compare items, evaluate alternatives, track prices, and make confident purchase decisions without drowning in tabs, screenshots, and endless options.

You will join as a contractor through Designstream, fully supported by our small, high-talent, outcome-driven team. We focus on impact, clarity, and problem-solving, not hours logged.

This role is ideal for someone who combines deep UX craft, strong research instincts, excellent UI aesthetics, and a proactive, founder-ready mindset.

The Real Job

You’ll be the UX leader responsible for turning chaotic consumer shopping behavior into clean, intuitive, intelligent product experiences.

This is not a “wait for specs” role. This is end-to-end UX ownership where you will:

• Understand how shoppers browse, compare, doubt, and decide
• Turn user insights into wireframes, flows, prototypes, and polished UI
• Shape information architecture and interaction patterns from day one
• Run UX research continuously — interviews, usability tests, observational studies
• Benchmark competitors, analyze patterns, and propose product improvements
• Brainstorm, ideate, and bring clarity to ambiguous problems
• Help build the early UX foundation and design system
• Influence product decisions directly with founder + engineering

Your success =users saying: “This makes shopping way easier — finally.”

What You'll Actually Do Day-to-Day

UX Research & Discovery

• Conduct user interviews, contextual inquiries, and lightweight ethnographic research
• Run usability tests on prototypes and live flows
• Map real shopping journeys and identify friction
• Perform heuristic evaluations and UX audits
• Benchmark competitor experiences and industry standards
• Translate insights into actionable product recommendations

UX & UI Design

• Design responsive, clean, visually compelling UI
• Build user flows, wireframes, sketches, journey maps, and prototypes
• Create interaction patterns, microinteractions, and usable interfaces
• Make decisions informed by frameworks, not intuition alone
• Uphold high-quality visual aesthetics (spacing, hierarchy, typography)

Rapid Iteration & Prototyping

• Prototype concepts in Figma quickly
• Test with real users and refine based on feedback
• Validate ideas through rapid experiments and short cycles
• Kill ideas early that don’t work — saving time and engineering resources

Product & Collaboration

• Work directly with founder + engineering (no heavy PM layers)
• Bring clarity when ambiguity or noise appears
• Ask for prioritization and direction when needed
• Manage founder urgency thoughtfully
• Communicate clearly, calmly, and without ego
• Take bold design bets when the user benefits

UX Leadership

• Establish foundational UX patterns and design principles
• Help shape V1 of the design system
• Champion user-centric thinking across the team
• Identify opportunities to improve activation, clarity, and retention

You're Our Person If You…

You've Strong  In

• UX research
• UX design
• UI design
• Interaction design
• Information architecture
• Wireframing & prototyping
• User flows & journey mapping
• Benchmarking & competitive analysis
• Ideation, brainstorming, and conceptual exploration

+ Have a sharp eye for aesthetics and polished UI

+

Deeply care about solving the real problem, not just delivering artifacts

Mindset

• Ambitious and eager to grow in a fast-moving product environment
• Don’t take feedback personally — you iterate, improve, and keep moving
• Can manage founder anxiety and urgency with professionalism
• Ask for help, clarity, or prioritization when needed
• Comfortable making bold or risky UX recommendations
• Love talking to users and observing behavior
• Thrive in ambiguous, zero-to-one environments

Soft Skills

• Calm under pressure
• Excellent communicator
• Emotionally intelligent
• Collaborative and low-ego
• Can filter noise and focus on what moves the product forward

What We're Not Looking For

• Pixel-only designers
• Researchers who take 6 weeks to produce a report
• Designers who wait for instructions
• People who need heavy PM processes and rigid specs
• Anyone who says “that’s not my job”

Why This Role Matters

Shopping online is broken. People have 47 tabs open, screenshots everywhere, links lost in texts. They're recreating the same searches daily, missing price drops, buying the wrong size.

You'll help us fix this for millions of people. Not with committees and roadmaps, but by talking to real humans and building what they actually need.

Your UX decisions will directly impact product direction, user behavior, and growth.

Why Designstream?

Designstream is a small, dense team of talented global operators redesigning how top professionals work with startups.

We believe in:

• Outcomes → not hours
• Clarity → not chaos
• Talent → not headcount
• Quality → not quantity

We are:

• A true partner — not an agency. We embed with founders and teams to solve product problems, not just deliver projects.
• Proactive — not reactive. We take initiative, anticipate needs, and move things forward without waiting for instructions.
• Product & tech-obsessed — not here for the clock. We care about shipping great products and solving real user problems, not just billing hours.
• AI-first — not tied to outdated tools. We leverage modern AI and data tools to accelerate discovery, testing, and design.

As a contractor with Designstream, you get:

• Dedicated support from our UX & product-minded team
• Exposure to strong US-based founders
• A flexible structure with real ownership
• A long-term path if both sides align

Tools & Language

• Figma

— Senior-level proficiency. Confident building component systems, high-fidelity UI, and clickable prototypes.
- English

— Fluent. Comfortable leading meetings, presenting work, and discussing design topics in depth.

The Interview Process

Super straightforward:

1. Quick chat

(30 min): Tell us about yourself, we'll tell you about the product.
2. Talk to real users

(6-8hs test): Use the product, talk to users, extract insights. And make a Lo-Fi proposal. We will pay you for your time.
3. Final meeting (1h) presentation time.

Compensation Details

Contract:

$23-36/hour | Fixed Rate $4K - $6K /mo.

We're flexible and transparent. Tell us what works for you.