Lead Product Designer

Materialize is a novel product: a streaming database developers already know how to use. We’ve wrapped a best-in-class, battle-tested stream processor - Timely Dataflow - in a SQL database. This means that Materialize users get the best of both worlds: the guarantees you expect from a traditional database alongside the low-latency performance you want from a stream processor.

Materialize is deployed as a scalable, persistent, fully-managed cloud service. Our users span a wide variety of use cases and verticals, but they all have one thing in common: they’re able to build real-time applications on top of Materialize just using standard, PostgreSQL-compatible SQL. 

Who We Are:

At Materialize, we’re experts in streaming systems, databases, and high-growth startups. Members of our team came from Ververica, Cockroach Labs, Google, Facebook, Stripe, and Dropbox. And, they include domain experts like Frank McSherry, our co-founder and Chief Scientist, who created Timely and Differential Dataflow and has decades of award-winning research in all aspects of data.

We’re HQ’d in NYC with employee hubs and remote workers in a handful of other locations, including San Francisco, Seattle, and Berlin.

Investors:

Lightspeed Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins, and Redpoint Ventures.

About the role:

We’re looking for our first full-time, in-house designer to join our dynamic, collaborative, and remote-friendly Materialize team!

You will be working on our Cloud product, which encompasses every part of the Materialize platform, and have the unique, hands-on opportunity to make a huge impact. In addition to designing the end-to-end experience of the product, the lead designer will help test prototypes and features in beta with customers and develop a design system for the whole company.

You’re not required to have _everything_ listed below; if this ad speaks to you at all, please apply! Above all, we are looking for a designer who would thrive in a start-up environment, where there are myriad opportunities to bring their experience, creativity and entrepreneurial spirit to define and own the user experience.

You will:

• Design user interfaces and flows that delight users and help them get things done
• Prototype design concepts
• Solicit customer feedback and run user tests with prototypes or real code
• Give and receive frequent feedback with engineers as the team implements new features
• Lead the design vision for Materialize
• Coordinate with stakeholders across the organization: marketing, sales, product, engineering, and leadership

You are:

• An effective and proactive communicator--verbal, written, and drawn
• Talented at creating prototypes for quickly proposing solutions as well as designing refined visuals
• Transparent in your process and brave enough to show in-progress work
• Comfortable with ambiguity and changing company needs
• Collaborative, kind, and respectful to your colleagues

You have:

• A portfolio of work that demonstrates deep problem solving, testing hypotheses, and delivering high-quality results
• Experience designing B2B enterprise products from concept to completion
• Curiosity about new ideas and desire to learn from missteps
• Proven ability to work across teams and functions to derive the input needed to make design decisions
• An aptitude for educating coworkers, explaining why a design is the way it is, and discussing alternatives’ pros and cons
• Experience at other startups and/or small teams

Bonus points:

• You’ve built user interfaces targeted at a technical audience before
• UX research experience
• Team management experience
• Experience in the database industry
• There are low-quality whiteboard diagrams or scratch paper drawings in your portfolio because they solved a real problem
• Experience with fit-and-finish interaction design: clickables, animations, etc.
• Extra points if you’re in New York, NY or wouldn’t mind visiting occasionally
• Major plus: You have ever tried to do anything with the AWS developer dashboard

We understand it takes a diverse team of highly intelligent, passionate, curious, and creative people to develop the exceptional product we are building. Our dynamic team has incredible perspectives to share, just as we know you do, and we take great pride in being an equal opportunity employer.