Senior Product Designer

Posted Sep 7

The cloud-backed terminal for individuals and teams

Warp is modernizing the command line to make it more intuitive, collaborative, and intelligent for developers and teams.

We believe there’s an opportunity to build a generational company known for considered, high quality developer products – products developers love rather than tools they tolerate – to displace antiquated developer tools that have mediocre user experiences.

The traditional terminal is a prime example of this type of tool having not meaningfully changed in the past 40 years, and is ripe for innovation. By fundamentally reimagining its experience – improving its UX, making it intelligent and collaborative – we can help developers ship better software more quickly.

For more information on our team and culture, we highly recommend reading our How We Work.

We care deeply about design and user experience and are trying to improve the design of a tool that traditionally has had a horrible UX. Warp is changing how every software engineer works with the terminal, one of their core tools, which hasn’t been redesigned in decades. We’re looking for outstanding product designers to join our early team to help reimagine how developers get more done; we need to build this product the right way from the start. It needs to be intuitive, seamless, and delightful.

The command line is both incredibly powerful and annoyingly hard to use. It hasn’t been updated since its introduction in the 1970’s, and this stagnation certainly shows in today’s user experience. Even though the terminal is a tool that every developer uses everyday, it has a notoriously steep learning curve: it doesn't work like other tools, nothing in it helps you learn how to use it well, it's very easy to make destructive mistakes…the list goes on. For all these reasons, getting comfortable with the terminal can take quite some time. But for those who do learn how to use it well, they can greatly improve their productivity and workflow — getting much more done in less time.

To further illustrate, here’s Zach Lloyd, our CEO and founder, giving a quick 2-min tour of the product and talking about design @ Warp: https://www.loom.com/share/64b15b0144844434b8e0b1c656cf8b01

As a Senior Product Designer, you will…

Design and prototype product experiences for Warp using Figma in close collaboration with Warp’s engineering team
Play a key part in the foundational product design strategy by leading decisions with user-centered design thinking, especially in cross-functional team collaborations.
Craft every detail of new product features, from idea to UX to pixel-perfect execution
Run projects end to end with engineers to drive your vision to the ship line

You may be a good fit if...

You have well-rounded skills and experience to run projects independently end to end
You have a lived understanding of developers’ needs and want to improve their relationships with their tools.
You're committed to building and facilitating relationships with non-designers to execute on your shared vision of building the best product for our users
You have great communication skills, and your approach to working with others is inclusive and empathetic. You’re capable of fostering rich discussions and partnerships with the entire team.
Bonus:

Familiar with the developer experience
Some basic experience with coding or using a terminal
Rapid prototyping and/or motion design

At Warp, we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace. So if you’re excited about this role, but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in this job description – we encourage you to apply anyways! We are a community of curious learners, and most of us are learning some skills for the first time (like our engineers learning to program Warp in Rust). You might be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Salary Transparency

Total compensation at Warp consists of two parts: 1) a competitive base salary, and most importantly, 2) meaningful equity.

When we find the right person, we try to put our best foot forward with an offer that excites you. We consider what you’d like to be paid, the skills and experience you bring, what similar jobs pay, and make sure there’s equal pay for equal work among those you’ll be working with. The budgeted compensation amount for this role is targeted at $190,000 - $215,000.

In addition to salary, all employees receive further compensation in the form of equity in the company. This is a meaningful stock option grant with a four-year vesting period and one-year cliff. Your equity is where most of the significant upside potential is. Comparing startup equity is always a bit tricky, so we’re happy to walk you through different valuation scenarios at the offer stage in order to help paint a clearer picture of the upside.

Final total compensation is determined by multiple factors including your experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.

What We Offer

Competitive Salary & Meaningful Equity – we will stretch to get the right talent on board
Full Medical, Dental and Vision Benefits
Flexible remote-first culture, with optional WeWork in SF and an office space in NYC for folks who want to work together IRL
20-days of Paid Time Off
12 US Holidays
16 weeks of paid Parental Leave for both birthing and non-birthing parents
Twice-a-year company retreats
Monthly gym stipend
401(k)
Pre-Tax FSA Health Savings Plan
Complimentary OneMedical membership

Individuals seeking employment at Warp are considered without regards to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, or sexual orientation.

About Warp

We are a company run by product-first builders, building a core product for all developers. We are committed to understanding our users deeply. We believe we will ultimately build the best product and business if that team includes developers and designers from a wide range of backgrounds. The early team comes from Google, Dropbox, Gem, LinkedIn, and Facebook. We are looking for passionate individuals to join us and help bring Warp to the world.

We value honesty, humility, and pragmatism, and our core product principle is focusing on the user. If you’re interested in learning more about our company values and what our engineering team culture is like, please take a look at our internal How We Work guide.

We’re very fortunate to be backed by a great group of venture capital firms. In August 2023, we announced a $50M Series B funding round ($73M total raised), led by Sequoia Capital. Our other investors include Google Ventures, Neo, and Box Group. We are also backed by a network of passionate angels, including Dylan Field (Co-Founder and CEO, Figma), Elad Gil (early investor in Airbnb, Pinterest, Stripe, and Square), Jeff Weiner (Executive Chairman and Ex-CEO, LinkedIn), Marc Benioff (Founder and CEO, Salesforce), and Sam Altman (Co-Founder & CEO, OpenAI).

The Product

Here's our latest demo showing some of our current features…

This is just the start, as our plan is to build out a set of experiences in the terminal that don’t exist today like collaboration, environment sharing, rich data types and more.

The Opportunity

The terminal is one of very few tools used by every developer every day, which makes it an ideal gateway to improving all sorts of developer activities. We believe there is an opportunity to build a unicorn-sized business improving the command-line. Our strategy is bottom-up developer adoption, followed by driving revenue through enterprise sales and distribution partnerships.

To start, our goal is to become the everyday terminal of choice with individual users – immediately usable as a backwards-compatible terminal replacement with the developer’s shell of choice. We have built a closed-source server, which will implement all of the cloud-enabled features. These features will invite users to share their work with others, driving growth and encouraging collaboration. We’ll also focus on building a community and an ecosystem of terminal plugins and apps, creating network effects.

At higher levels of team penetration, we will offer an enterprise plan with features around privacy, security and environment management (e.g. secure distribution and management of API keys). These larger enterprise plans will be the ultimate driver of revenue, along with potential distribution deals for companies that see CLI integrations as a way to reach new customers.

A couple college students, totally unprompted, wrote a piece on why new students should work at Warp as part of their new newsletter they are launching called "Why You Should Join." It's an incredibly well researched and thoughtful article about the market and competitive landscape, and accurately reflects our thesis. Read it here.