Staff Product Designer
recMillbrae (CA)
$160,000 per year
ApplyAbout the role
About Rec
Think about the last time you tried to book a tennis court. Or sign your kid up for a swim lesson. Or find an open rec league that actually fits your schedule. You probably ended up on a website that looked like it was built in 2003 — or god forbid, filled out a piece of paper.$3T is spent on recreation globally, and it's built on a completely fragmented system that’s largely untouched by technology. At Rec, we’re using AI to change that — reimagining how the world plays, participates in community, and gets active. Our vision is simple: more activity for everyone. We sit at a rare intersection — a consumer product loved by everyday players and an enterprise platform trusted by the organizations that power recreation. We’re a small team with firepower. Our founders were among the first few hundred at Uber, then led teams at The Athletic and MasterClass. The rest of the team combines builders from Google, Microsoft, Strava, Hipcamp, and Airbnb. People join Rec for two reasons: you want to build AI that gets people back in the real world, and you want to work with really smart people.
About the Role:
Rec’s platform spans programs, facilities, memberships, payments, and the admin tools that recreation organizations run their entire business on. As Platform Designer, you’ll own design for this side of the product end to end — taking ambiguous, often messy operational problems ("our facility booking is confusing," "instructors can’t tell what they’re supposed to do") and turning them into flows that are simple for the humans running rec centers, leagues, and facilities, while staying coherent across a genuinely complex, multi‑object system underneath. This isn’t a role where a PM hands you a spec and you make it pretty. You’ll go find the problem, define what v1 actually is, and stay with it through build and QA.What You’ll DoOwn features end to end: research the problem, define information architecture and flows, take designs to high fidelity, write the spec, and stay engaged through engineering handoff and QA.Hold the full platform model in your head — programs, facilities, memberships, payments — and design in a way that keeps all of it coherent as the product grows. Take fuzzy, undefined problems and turn them into a scoped v1, deciding what’s in and what’s deliberately left out, and being able to explain why. Push for a rough version live in production over a polished one sitting in Figma, and know when that trade‑off is the right call. Use AI tools as part of your everyday process — prototyping in code, generating and evaluating variations, drafting copy, synthesizing research — and apply real design judgment and taste to what comes out of them. Work closely with engineering and the founding team in a small, fast‑moving environment where design decisions ship quickly.
What We’re Looking For:
Strong systems thinking: you can design for complex, multi‑object domains without losing coherence across the product.
A track record of owning features end to end, from ambiguous problem to shipped, QA’d product.
Comfort operating without a spec — you can independently figure out the real problem and the right scope.
A bias toward shipping over perfecting, with the judgment to know which moments call for which.
Fluency with AI tools as part of your design workflow, paired with the taste to know what to keep and what to discard.
Genuine interest in Rec’s mission: using AI to get people back into the real world, and doing it alongside people you’ll learn a lot from.
Our Values:
Be Relentless. Move fast. Own it. Ship real value early and often.
Win Together. Speak up, go beyond the boundaries of your role. That’s how we win.
Take Pride. Treat this like it’s yours — because it is.
Pay & Benefits
Compensation:
$160,000–$200,000 base + meaningful equity (final offer will be based on your background, experience and skillset)
Benefits:
Flexible PTO, top‑tier health/dental/vision, and a 401(k) plan to support your future.
Work location: San Francisco
Before you apply
Applying takes about a minute. These four things decide how fast it moves after that.
Your profile is current
It's what we read first. Occupations, seniority and locations matter more than a long history.
Two examples you can talk through
Not a portfolio — just two pieces of work where you can explain the decisions and what you'd change.
A number in mind
What you're on now and what would make you move. We negotiate better when we know both.
Your notice period
Employers plan around it, and it's the question that stalls offers most often.
Once you apply, someone reads it and calls you before anything reaches the employer — usually within two working days.
More like this