Senior Designer

This is a linkpost from our most recent hiring post. See the original post with more information here.

When we are at our best, I think we produce world-class design. AI 2027 was I think a great design achievement, so is much of LessWrong.com itself. I also think on a product and business level, making things beautiful and intuitive and well-crafted is crucial. I like some of Patrick Collison's thinking on this:

If Stripe is a monstrously successful business, but what we make isn't beautiful, and Stripe doesn't embody a culture of incredibly exacting craftsmanship, I'll be much less happy. I think the returns to both of those things in the world are really high. I think even beyond the pecuniary or financial returns, the world's just uglier than it needs to be… One can do things well or poorly, and beauty is not a rivalrous good.

My intuition is that more of Stripe's success than one would think is downstream of the fact that people like beautiful things—and for kind of rational reasons because what does a beautiful thing tell you? Well it tells you the person who made it really cared… And so if you care about the infrastructure being holistically good, indexing on the superficial characteristics that you can actually observe is not an irrational thing to do.

I want us to continue making beautiful and well-designed things. Indeed, we currently have enormous demand for making more things like AI 2027 and DecidingToWin.org, with multiple new inquiries for projects like this per month, and I think many of those opportunities could be great. I also think LessWrong itself is substantially bottlenecked on design.

Now, design is a very broad category. The specific role I want to hire for is someone helping us make beautiful websites. This very likely implies understanding HTML and CSS deeply, and probably benefits a lot from frontend coding experience. But I can imagine someone who is just used to doing great design in Figma, without touching code directly, making this work.

This is a senior role! I am expecting to work with whoever we hire in this role more closely than I am currently working with many of my current core staff, and for this role to involve managing large design projects end-to-end. Correspondingly I am expecting that we will pay a salary in the range of $160k - $300k for this role, with the rough aim of paying ~70% of that person's counterfactual industry salary.

Apply here