Senior Designer
You will be responsible for pushing MUI's component design bar higher.
Details of the Role
- Location: Remote (preference for UTC-6 to UTC+5).
- Type of work: Full-time (contractor or employee depending on circumstances).
- Level: 3 or above.
- We're a remote company, operating mostly asynchronously (written communication over meetings).
About the company
MUI started with Material UI, the most successful React implementation of Google's Material Design. We have gained a large following, thanks to our focus on Material Design fidelity, our obsession with details, on offering a large number of components, our community engagement, and by carefully improving the DX. Today, countless teams and organizations rely on our open-source libraries to build their design system.
A couple of years ago, we started to expand our suite of products. We released MUI X, a collection of advanced components; MUI Design kits, the MUI components available for Figma, Sketch, etc.; and also host Templates, a set of pre-built UI kits. We've seen rapid growth with all of them (2-3x per year) and we have more to come. We are building a low-code platform for developers to significantly increase the speed and lower the barrier for creating simple CRUD/dashboard UIs with MUI's libraries.
We are a fully distributed team, spread across multiple time zones. We work mainly asynchronously, relying mostly on written collaboration. Every contributor has the freedom to define how they work — the rest of us won't know what you're doing day-to-day unless you tell us. For additional details about the MUI team and culture, you can check our careers and about pages and also our public Handbook.
Why we're hiring
Both our open-source community and our premium products are growing fast (x2 YoY). We need talented people to keep that going!
We are aiming to make high-end design accessible to the many, empowering developers that lack access to a designer as well as saving time for designers with a source they can trust. According to our last survey, the quality of the design execution (UX & UI) is the most important criteria used by developers & designers to pick their next UI library.
Why this is interesting
Our products empower React developers to build amazing applications faster – we see millions of developers on MUI's docs every year, one million a month.
However, despite Material UI – our biggest library – being the leading UI design system in the frontend space, its adoption is only at 25%. More importantly, our challenges go way beyond the ones of design systems.
We envision a future where MUI becomes the default toolkit for web developers to create UIs. It's why we've been expanding our offering with Joy UI, MUI Base, and MUI Toolpad. Design is foundational to achieving this goal.
About the role
Designers at MUI are essentially team leaders. That means you'll be working closely with your engineering lead counterpart to shape work and scope targeting a set of problems revolving around our component area, either on MUI Core or MUI X (to be further defined).
As our design philosophy states, you'll be conducting and guiding the whole team, making sure everything we do is adding a special design spice that only you can add. We imagine a world where design execution is a definitive product differentiator.
What you'll do on a day-to-day basis
- Ensure high-quality user interface and UX work across MUI Core or MUI X components and design systems
- Oversee the design kits production of the component set you'll be responsible for
- Lead the design process for your team, from research to testing to implementation
- Collaborate with product managers and engineers to strategize work that is aligned with business goals and user needs
- Review designs from other team members and provide feedback to ensure all MUI design output has the same level of quality
About you
If you get excited by thinking about design systems, high-level of craftsmanship, accessible components, and joyful experiences, then we're looking for you!
We're looking for designers who are generalists, meaning they can navigate from very high-level product strategy discussions to low-level implementation work.
As a company that develops code-based products, it's important that you have a grasp of development to be effective. Concretely, that means you can at least picture how a given CSS snippet looks like just by reading it. Being able to contribute to the codebase yourself, open pull requests, and improve documentation or components is very valuable.
We strongly believe designers should code to ensure the level of detail they've wished for is really being implemented. So, if you're this designer, either already able to code or growing in this direction, we're looking for you.
Other skills you should have
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills. You will communicate both in writing and verbally with our globally-distributed team, community members, and enterprise customers. English is the primary language we interact in.
- Experience building and evaluating UI/UX. You can design attractive UIs with well-thought-out interaction patterns that solve practical user problems.
- Design systems experience. You have previously worked on or contributed to the creation of a design system. You are meticulous about component APIs, standards, and organization.
- Relative development autonomy. Ability to read HTML/JSX and CSS is a requirement. Being able to code and contribute to the codebase would be a significant advantage, but isn't required for the role.
It would be nice if you had but it isn't required
- Past experience with open-source projects. You understand the unique dynamics of products in an open-source environment as well as common challenges that arise.
Benefits & Compensation
We are ready to pay competitive, top market rates, for a person that can cleary exceed the role's expectations. Therefore, we consider profile and location. You can find the other perks & benefits on the careers page.
Interview steps
Here's a brief overview of how this role's process will be carried through:
- Introduction call (20 to 25 min): A short call to quickly introduce each other.
- Career deep dive (40 to 60 min ⎯ with a designer): We'll go through your career a bit more in-depth and will be interested in understanding your trajectory up to the point where you've applied to this role.
- Comparable experience review (40 to 60 min ⎯ with a designer, product manager or tech lead): We'll deep dive into a presentation of relevant past experiences to understand your approach to problem-solving and design.
- Conversation with the CEO (60 min): A quick call so you get to know each other, and talk about vision, future, history, etc.
We like to encourage candidates to also see all of these conversations as opportunities for you to interview us as well. It's highly encouraged to bring whatever questions you see fit to make sure we are also a great role for you.
How to apply?
Don't tick every bullet? Apply anyway! Research shows that certain folx are less likely to apply for a role than others unless they meet 100% of the outlined qualifications. If this role excites you, we want to hear from you. We'd love for you to share the unique skills, passion, and experience you could bring to MUI.