Senior Product Designer, Cooking

New York Times Cooking is looking for a Senior Product Designer to lead the design of a new suite of editorial tools to produce our recipes.

Mission Overview & Responsibilities: 

We aim for the quality of our publishing tools to match the expertise and empower the goals of New York Times editors and the Cooking product organization. We are building a new content management system (CMS) that will be the foundation of all of our recipe-related content for years to come. As the dedicated designer for this tools suite, you’ll improve workflows, unlock new formats and capabilities, and help editors publish delicious, everyday recipes for those who love to cook.

As a Senior Product Designer, you’ll work as an individual contributor with product, technology, and editorial partners to work towards the vision of Cooking’s new CMS product, Easy Bake. In your first year, your focus will be to set a foundation for a brand-new recipe editor. You’ll get to know the ins and outs of the lifecycle of a recipe, identify important newsroom workflows, translate requirements into designs, test low-fidelity flows directly with editors, and pair with engineering partners to ship a quality MVP. Beyond, you’ll design tools to manage all of our content types.

If you enjoy iterating toward a larger vision, rendering complex interactions simple, quickly validating your ideas, and thoughtfully applying and extending design systems, this is the role for you.

You will report to Cooking’s Product Design Director. The Cooking Mission is based in New York, NY. We are open to remote candidates.

• You will collaborate on high-level product strategy, identifying distinct needs and guiding the right questions. 
• You will create and utilize documentation (e.g. user journeys, experience maps, wireframes, frameworks) to lead discussions and decision-making.
• You will develop multiple solutions and concrete approaches for product ideas, collaborating with engineers and product teams to refine and establish requirements.
• You will conduct informal testing with editors, incorporate insights into designs, and produce production-ready deliverables using design patterns while ensuring design quality throughout the development process.
• You will contribute to team and product design rituals. Nurture our design team, with an eye toward inspiring and mentoring your teammates and enhancing processes and documentation.

Basic Qualifications: 

• 5+ years of experience designing digital products—especially on the web—with product and engineering collaborators.
• 1+ years of recent experience leading complex design efforts on a project-by-project basis.
• A portfolio of work that showcases your design process along with finished design work.

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Experience creating designs for publishing/internal tools or tools with heavy user-facing controls.
• Demonstrated expertise in solving for complex states, iterating on designs based on usage patterns, user feedback, and adapting to the evolving competitive landscape.
• Experience making on-brand visual choices that enhance informational clarity, guide user behavior, and follow platform and interaction conventions.
• Experience creating artifacts for and facilitating user research sessions. 
• Experience writing copy that addresses specific audiences and their needs at a given point in time.
• Experience facilitating workshops and brainstorms with cross-functional collaborators.
• Advanced proficiency in Figma (including its prototyping functionality) or comparable tools.
• Demonstrated understanding of modern HTML & CSS and a grasp of current development philosophies/methodologies for building consumer products.
• An interest in food/cooking and enthusiasm for the mission of The New York Times.

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