Overview

You.com is the world’s first open search engine platform that summarizes the web for users, with no ads, superior privacy choices, and personalization through preferred sources.

You.com is more than just a new search engine — it’s a movement to make the internet a place of trust, facts, and kindness — our guiding principles that we’re committing to from day one.

It’s an audacious goal, but we’re ambitious people. We’re looking for a few more ambitious folks to join our team.

We’re not just wide-eyed dreamers – we’re pragmatic doers, too. Our founder and CEO, Richard Socher previously started an AI company called MetaMind. Salesforce acquired the company, and Richard became Chief Scientist, leading the company’s AI efforts. Prior to MetaMind, Richard received the best Ph.D. thesis award from Stanford for his groundbreaking work on deep learning. Bryan McCann, co-founder and CTO, is a scientist and philosopher who led natural language processing teams at Salesforce after completing his Master’s in C.S. at Stanford. Our founding team members have built companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars and scaled software to serve millions of users. For fun, we run marathons, paramotor, write poetry, read Latin, hike, and camp in the middle of nowhere.

If this sounds intriguing, say hello!

About the Job

At you.com, we are unusually passionate about great design and empowering our customers in their daily lives. We are looking for amazing new teammates ready to and capable of taking Web and mobile design to the next level and building the foundations of design for a complex, information-rich, consumer-facing product with a positive impact on a broad user base, and shape those experiences from the very first concepts to the final shipping product, by combining their conceptual design skillset with immaculate attention to detail.

You:

You are a brilliant problem solver, a quick study, a resourceful self-starter, and an excellent communicator with a passion for great design and the ability to achieve it. Ideally, you possess that rare blend of UX design, interaction design, visual design, and prototyping skills with the innate ability to deliver designs on time.

Your thinking will be woven into our product for decades, so it’s essential that your work is thoughtful, nuanced, and careful. You can quickly grasp and distill highly complex ideas into clean, understandable experiences for people. Nothing you design is arbitrary or random, and people who use our product will feel that you’ve thought about them already.

Your role will also require you to cheerfully and persistently meet with our founders, stakeholders, and users to validate design decisions and gather requirements. From brainstorming through implementation, you’ll work with members of the cross-disciplinary team. And you’ll be a good diplomat with strong communication skills to present your designs, convey your reasoning to company stakeholders, and be comfortable with your ideas being challenged and debated in this setting.

At the same time, you should enjoy working on a product that’s in the chaotic, nascent stages of development: this means the project criteria are vague. You’ll need to be comfortable experimenting rapidly and iteratively. Rigorous, data-supported thinking is appreciated, but you should also be comfortable relying decisively on finely-honed intuition when clear answers aren’t available.

You will have the opportunity to help define the visual language and the design process for the new internet and the rest of the team; therefore, you possess relentless attention to detail and an uncommon eye for aesthetic taste and quality.

It would be best if you were excited to own portions of the design process that best match your experience and work with us to hire additional designers so that we can build a balanced, world-class design team.

You want to champion, revise, and refine your contributions all the way through to deployment. Finally, you should deeply resonate with our vision to build a new internet on trust, kindness, facts, and empathy.

We are looking for designers of all kinds — reach out and tell us what your ideal role and title would be as part of our team because we value potential as much as experience. We believe that many skills can be picked up whenever required for the task; however, an excellent eye for detail, integrity, and the willingness to that extra mile is part of our company’s DNA.

Since our goal is to build experiences that benefit the world, we want our team to be maximally representative of the world and be inclusive of people of all walks of life: people of a variety of races, nationalities, ages, and socio-economic backgrounds — kids, women, men, parents, grand-parents perhaps.

Someone with a proven track record of working in start-ups (or new initiatives in big corporations), jumpstarting, and completing complex projects involving all stages — from problem analysis and research to high fidelity mockups and detailed specifications — will be given preference.

Key Qualifications/ Requirements:

To apply, you must have the right expertise and education, a web-based portfolio, a resume, and a cover letter.

Expertise/ Education:

5+ years in the field

Minimum: Bachelors Degree in BA or BS. Preferred: Masters. Degree in interaction design, human-computer interaction, information science, cognitive science, computer science, or equivalent is strongly desired for this position, though exceptions may be made.

Location:

You.com is located in the beautiful San Francisco Bay Area, however, we are willing to look into applications from all over the world.

Portfolio:

A web-based portfolio + resume shows in-depth experience around interaction design, visual design (related to interaction design), or similar experience across various digital media. A link to your online portfolio is required. Make sure to provide passwords as needed. Applications without a portfolio will not be considered. If parts of your portfolio involved group work, please explain your specific role in the project. Bonus points if you include any projects you have worked on for fun or solve a problem yourself! If you include your LinkedIn profile, that’s great; however, please know that your LinkedIn profile does not count as a portfolio.

Please use the statements below to understand some of the immediate needs we see. We imagine many of these needs will be split across multiple hires depending on each individual’s skill composition. However, many of these statements should likely resonate with you:

Does any of this resonate with you?

  • A passion for com, our vision, values, products, and our customers is a must.
  • Able to work independently and in a team environment.
  • Extensive experience with UX design for “high volume” consumer-facing Web platforms and products and be well-versed in HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, Android, macOS, and iOS user experience conventions and patterns.
  • Experience designing all aspects of large-scale mobile and Web content management systems, including content management, creation, editing, localizing, publishing, social media, and eCommerce, and similar.
  • Experience in handling several complex projects simultaneously.
  • Flexible and comfortable with ambiguity and change during a project.
  • You must have the ability to create simple, elegant, and useful designs and beautiful, approachable, and playful.
  • Rigorous attention to detail, consistency, and an uncommon eye for aesthetic taste and quality.
  • You want to be involved in the visual aspect of creating a new Internet, but you also want to influence product direction and explore novel intersections between AI and Design.
  • You enjoy testing your hypotheses in a tight user-validated feedback loop.
  • A (web-based) portfolio of work that showcases excellence in interaction design, visual design, and problem-solving, whether it is a collection of professional, academic, or personal projects.
  • Outstanding ability to communicate your ideas to designers, engineers, product managers, and leadership through storytelling, visuals, and presentations.
  • You want to play an active role in your work’s entire lifetime, from design to the magical experience it creates for users, working with teammates throughout the product, design, and engineering.
  • You are passionate about technology, a scientific approach to development, and experimentation in the product and across all parts of the organization.
  • You want to be part of defining and building a team around a vision and technology that has a direct path to improving people’s daily lives worldwide.
  • You bring expertise in a particular area of UX Research, UX Design, UI Design, or Product Design, or are a Design Generalist/ Designer Who Codes.
  • Experience presenting user experience goals and advocating for design choices with senior leadership.
  • If your expertise is in UX Research, you’ve worked in UX related to consumer software products and interfaces used by a broad cross-section of global users. You have led critical research efforts and multi-phase, mixed-method studies that have produced crucial insights into user experience and product strategy.
  • Proactive collaborator and communicator, experienced in working within large, highly cross-functional teams.
  • Ability to clearly communicate concepts and designs through sketches, wireframes, high fidelity comps, and prototypes.
  • Proficiency with modern design tools including Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe XD, Adobe Photoshop, Sketch, Figma, Keynote, and similar tools. Expertise in documenting interaction details, visual design specifications, and QA of the implemented product.
  • The closer you work with engineers, the more you should bring your designs to life by defining CSS and React components that define our visual language.

More about You.com

You.com is an equal opportunity employer: your race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or disability status don’t matter. We’re committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and supportive workplace that is effectively distributed around the world.

We’re a remote-first company, but work hours are generally within the Pacific Timezone (7 hours behind UTC). We get together in-person regularly as a team, but as long as your able to maintain significant overlap with Pacific hours during the workday we’re comfortable hiring in almost any location (location-specific legal requirements permitting).

Benefits

  • Competitive salary and equity
  • Great health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family
  • 401(k) plan
  • Unlimited time off (4+ weeks encouraged annually)
  • Generous parental leave
  • Flexible work hours