Lead Product Builder, Product & Design

Location: NYC-based, or planning to spend significant time co‑located with the CEO in New York

Compensation: Competitive startup comp and meaningful equity upside

Department: Product

Reports to: CEO

Also posted as:
Senior Product Manager
· Lead Product Designer
· Product Lead
· Head of Product

Rare Candy is revolutionizing the $25 billion trading-card industry as the only community marketplace 100% dedicated to TCGs. Collectors use our AI-powered card scanner, data-rich collection tools, and jaw-dropping drops to buy, sell, rip, and showcase Pokémon, MTG, Lorcana, One Piece, and more. We've hit 10x revenue growth over the last 6 months, the business is highly profitable, and we're building the team to take this from a great product to a category-defining one.

We're a 10-person team moving fast and looking for the next set of TCG-obsessed rock stars to join our team.

With AI, the line between product manager and product designer has collapsed. The most valuable person on a modern product team is someone who can own the entire arc of building: understanding the customer, framing the problem, defining the spec, designing the experience, prototyping it to high fidelity, testing it, and handing engineering something so clear it's a joy to build.

Everything but shipping the production code. That's this role. Given the full-stack nature of the role, we’re excited to hear from candidates from PM, Design, and/or Engineering backgrounds.

This is our first full-time product and design hire, and you'll own the function. You'll own product craft end-to-end: research, specs, prototypes, design, and the engineering handoff. The CEO owns the product vision and final prioritization and stays deeply involved in the work with you. This is a true partnership, not a hand-off.

You should be excited about moving fast, learning quickly, and having a tremendous impact on the business and our users.

This is a high-bar role, and we're willing to search for the right person. If you're a seasoned product builder who's energized by a hands-on founder, lives at the intersection of product and design, and genuinely loves trading cards, keep reading.

First 30 days:
You own and ship a medium-sized feature plus a few small but important refinements end-to-end, with less hand-holding each week. You also help set up and organize our two-month roadmap. By day 30, the CEO trusts you to own things and ship them right.

First few months:
You're running the full product-management function, including roadmap execution, specs, prioritization, and shipping cadence, so the day-to-day product engine hums without the CEO project-managing it. You're designing and prototyping real surfaces to high fidelity yourself.

By the end of year one, you've shipped a body of high-impact work that moved our guiding metrics: weekly active users and new activated users. You've built the lightweight product process a fast-shipping team needs without bureaucratizing it, and you've earned the trust and shown the judgment to be on a credible path toward Head of Product.

• Own product end to end: from customer research and data to problem framing, to spec, to design, to high-fidelity prototype, to testing, to engineering handoff. The whole arc, everything but production code.

• Prototype to validate, not to ship: go straight to high-fidelity, interactive prototypes in Figma, Figma Make, Cursor, or whatever gets you there fastest, to pressure-test ideas and make engineering's job dramatically easier. The prototype is how we de-risk and communicate, not the thing that ships.

• Stay close to the customer and the numbers: fluent with both qualitative research and quantitative data. You tie every product decision to whether it moves active and new-user metrics.

• Partner with the CEO daily: you'll work closely framing up key decisions and strategy, building prototypes and working through feedback. You own the day-to-day output and will work collaboratively with the founders on prioritization and long-term strategy & vision.

• Collaborate across the team: work cleanly with engineering on handoff and build. Contract design…