Product Designer

Substack is building a new economic engine for culture, giving the brightest, most interesting, and most creative people on the internet the power of their own publishing platform. The terms of our culture should not be set by gate-keeping legacy media or chaos-fueling social media, but by the people who make and participate in that culture. Substack’s model, based on direct subscriptions, has fueled an explosion of independent publishing.

It empowers creators with economic autonomy, creative ownership, and a direct connection to their most engaged audiences.

Substack is looking for a Product Designer with —to borrow a phrase from an unlikely source— “engineering characteristics.” By this we mean someone with interest in and experience with the implementation of user interfaces in code, and especially someone capable and keen with LLMs and all the ways they can help design and development. What matters for this role is less mastery of a specific language, for example, than familiarity with software production processes and tools and the drive to go deeper.

We’re a team looking to exploit LLMs to make our work faster and better; some of us are quite technical, some of us are absolute novices to development, and we’re interested in the full range of applications of LLMs, from prototyping to straight-up owning front-end.

Because the rate of change is so high, we don’t feel confident about the exact skills or experiences that will make for the best candidate, so rather than saying e.g. “must be able to build everything you design” or “must be proficient in” this or that language, we’re trusting that candidates who can

• design products, features, and interfaces very ably
  , from complex web dashboards and flows to iOS and Android app and feed surfaces to smart televisions and so on; and

• are ready and eager to discern how best to leverage LLMs for prototyping and production (and even pixel-fitting and bug-fixing) and capable of doing so quickly

will understand what we’re looking for and whether they’re the right fit to be successful here, as this team, like so many, adapts to the new landscape.

Experienced designers know that commercial and economic realities shape the possibility spaces of product strategy. If success for a company means “selling more ads,” designers may achieve a lovely user interface or ideal typography, but everything will be in service of producing the same strange, often-nightmarish dynamics we all know from the many scaled platforms of the past decade.

Substack does not have silver bullets for the problems of human nature, and we will not avoid the costs of creating scaled platforms. But we do have a different model, one in which we make money only when creatives of all kinds earn money from audiences who value them enough to consistently pay them. Crucially, in this model, all scales are reduced: one needs thousands, not millions, of fans, and this difference alone changes the dynamics of the platform, and thus what’s possible with e.g. product architecture.

As fundamental, though, is the level of trust and interest involved in paid subscriptions. “What works” for Substack is what leads people to make long-term and real investments in independent creatives and collectives, and we hope this will lead to improved outcomes in aggregate across many types of features.

If you’re interested on working on this model, we’d love to chat! Design at Substack is somewhat wild, and we’re looking for rigorous, robust, high-output designers who are comfortable with the vagaries and dynamism of startup life. We are not a “best practices” shop; we have very little fixed process; we work closely with executives and other functions and we’re not territorial or precious.

But we get to shape the development of the most promising platform for creatives, we have a lovely and weird little team, and we have a lot of fun in our quite-free and friendly company. If this sounds compelling, hit us up!

• Rapidly build context about disparate product areas, community dynamics, and industry norms in any domains, from print media to…