Senior Product Designer

Posted Oct 21

What we're looking for:

You will be the second full-time product designer on the team—you'll work directly with Suhail
Experienced at talking to users and willing to constantly do so without encouragement
Willing to explore product ideas through design and animation before executing on them
Willing to throw away ideas if they're not great. Optimistic enough to keep hunting for new ones.
Excited to collaborate with everyone on the team: engineers, customer facing folks, etc—you believe inspiration can come from anywhere
You have good judgement to push the most impactful ideas forward that will make users happy
You don't believe users are our guinea pigs: we ship great products when they're ready and something we might often use ourselves.
You have good judgement of when to ship: perfect is the enemy of good
You care about details and are excited to keep pushing your work

Skills & Experience

Are an expert in either UI, UX, or visual design, but skilled in more disciplines across product design
Have 5+ years relevant design experience at a tech, product-driven company
Familiar with tools like or similar to Figma

Here are examples of things we’ve worked on:

Social features: commenting, uploading profile pictures, re-thinking the home page feed
Introducing ways to explore similar images to help our users be inspired by using CLIP-based embeddings.
Re-thinking navigation components from actions users take on images to our entire site menu system
Making it easy to select many images from a user's profile to download in a single zip file

**FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS**

How do I get in touch?

You can email us: jobs@playgroundai.com & we’ll be in touch! If your resume and background appear like a good match, someone will reach out for an initial phone screen.

Who else works at Playground?

Suhail, Aleks, Lin, Ehsan, Justin, Aakanksha, Javier, Nihanth, Lauren, Tyler, Patrick, Ali, David, Ermin, Daiqing

A few friends contract with us as well across design & engineering who work part-time.

Where is Playground located?

We do not have an official office. We all work 100% remotely from home: San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Toronto, NYC, Berlin, etc.

If working out of a physical location with most of your co-workers is your preference a majority of the time, we would not recommend applying.

Separating physical location from economic opportunity lets us radically expand the number of great people we can work with in the world.

Are you okay with remote employment?

Yes but only in the U.S. and Canada at this time due to timezone convenience and administration. We have been building a remote culture from day 1 prior to COVID-19. Exceptions apply for exceptional people.

As we grow, we plan to expand to more regions steadily once we have people in adjacent timezones.

Have you raised any money?

Yes - happy to tell you how much over the phone. We are a post-Series A company.

It’s in the many millions of dollars range, from firms and people like Initialized, Max Levchin, Paul Graham, Aaron Levie, Y Combinator, Paul Buchheit, Ron Conway, Kyle Vogt, Balaji, etc.

Do you provide any healthcare benefits?

Yes - medical, dental, vision, FSA and 401K (no match).

We also provide paid leave for loss of pregnancy for women of 2 weeks as well as cover travel and medical expenses for employees to obtain critical reproductive services.

How will Playground make money?

We’ll charge our users a subscription to use our creative tools. You can see our pricing plans here.

Our customers are pro-users and creators: people who might create books, have a YouTube channel, an Etsy store, etc. They aren’t your typical Adobe Photoshop user since our products make creative tools more accessible to more people.

Do you plan to train your own models?

Yes - we have a 6+ person research team working on building a state-of-the-art multi-task foundation model for pixels. Our goal is to create, edit, and understand everything about pixels. We’re focused on still 2D images first because we believe that’s the biggest market to go after and the right place to sequence our efforts.

We have 256+ H100s of compute committed to the team for the next 24 months. We’ll evaluate whether we need more compute as we scale up (as of Aug 18, 2023).

How many people do you plan to hire?

We plan to grow the team a bit to around ~18 total people through 2023. The next set of people are going to help us to do cutting edge research and ship excellent products that improve the creative possibilities for our customers.

What’s the interview process like?

We’ll likely do a quick 45-minute call just to make sure we’re on the same page. After that, we’d work together on a process that feels fair.

Generally, there are two options:

Our preferred situation is that we get to work together for several weeks on a full-time project (of course, we’d pay you whatever you think is fair). Often working together for a bit is a great way to determine whether there’s a good match as future teammates and it can give you a lot of transparency. We understand, however, that’s not always possible for everyone. Our minimum expectation for this trial is for 4 weeks, 40 hours per week.
There is still an interview process (via Zoom) with this option, but shorter.
A formal but practical interview--no trick/puzzle questions. (3-4 hours)
Maybe there’s a third option we haven’t thought of--we’re open-minded :)

For design roles, there will typically be a 1-hour portfolio review to understand process, thinking, and skill.

Who are your competitors?

In the short-term, there are many image generation creation tools that could be construed as competitors but we suspect our long-term plans will cause our paths to diverge eventually. Perhaps the most obvious competitor might be past-generation creative tools like Adobe’s Creative Suite but since the customers are likely different we don’t see this as a worrisome issue just yet.

What does your tech stack look like?

The user-facing product primarily is built using Next.js, React, TypeScript, Python, Tailwind, Postgres, Redis. For inference, we’re using PyTorch on many clusters of 8xA100 GPUs. Currently we rent GPUs but we’ll be soon using our purchased hardware early this year.

We’re still early on in thinking about AI-training stack but we’re primarily working in PyTorch.

What is work/life balance like at your company?

We usually leave work around 6 PM to have dinner with friends or family. As a result of being an early stage startup, we wouldn’t want to hide this reality to prospective candidates: raw hours actually make a big difference in the impact we can make right now. This won’t always be the case but it is at present. So, often we find ourselves working later on in the evening, on rare occasions a weekend, but it’s mostly driven by personal ambition. We don’t have any expectations of anyone to do so.

Our cultural values are...

An abridged version

Making users happy: our decisions, intention, results, and motivation stem from trying to please our users.
Asynchronous communication: deep work requires large chunks of time so we try to communicate asynchronously to provide more time for deep work.
Results driven: We do what we promised each other, customers, users, and investors. While effort is recognized, it’s not regarded equally. We care about what you achieve.
Kindness: While being kind may not seem ruthlessly connected to outcomes, it does make work a lot more fun. We suspect that’s key to doing great work over a long period of time.
Speed: We believe speed is a competitive advantage as a company. As companies get larger, they tend to get slower—we hope to decelerate that as much as possible. You should feel comfortable asking: “Could we do this faster?”

We want to be upfront about this: we do not institute quotas to be diverse — we have a goal to be the most talented company in the industry and we end up being diverse as a result of that goal. Playground AI plans to be a globally distributed company and we recognize that when it comes to politics, we value different viewpoints, but we don’t want to allow those differences to negatively affect our relationships with each other.

Are you open to bringing on interns for any of your roles?

Not at this time—unfortunately, we don’t have the bandwidth necessary to offer a stellar internship program. We need to invest every ounce of energy into making a great product first. We may reconsider in early 2024.

Have you seen anybody with a stutter or other speech impediment and how have you handled that?

We tend to err on asynchronous written communication, videos, audio notes, commenting in our task management app, etc. so an emphasis on speaking ability is less important at Playground AI. We do require you to speak good English however.

As long as you can communicate densely/succinctly, we encourage you to apply.

We hire candidates of any race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital or family status, disability, Veteran status, and any other status.

Disclaimer: If you’ve seen this FAQ and its words from other companies, it is because many people were inspired by our writing and copied it—sometimes verbatim. Unfortunately, there’s not much we can do but we don’t want to leave you with the impression that we’re lazy. We are the original authors and can prove it if you have doubt.