Principal Product Designer

About the role

You define the visual language, design culture, and standard of craft that every team at Clasp measures itself against. You own design as a discipline, shaping how Clasp looks, feels, and earns trust from the first marketing impression to the final repayment flow. You will establish foundational systems and make high-leverage brand and product decisions that do not currently exist. You partner directly with the Founder & CEO and Director of Product to frame problems and define the product vision. You will design and ship work yourself while building the foundation for a growing design organization. You ensure that a student's journey from ad to repayment feels like one coherent, trustworthy experience. You bring clarity and delight to complex, compliance-sensitive workflows while removing every unnecessary friction.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Define Design and Brand at Clasp by establishing visual identity, design language, and taste across all user interactions and marketing surfaces.
• Own the full experience from consumer acquisition flows and the marketing site to recruiter platforms, employee benefits experiences, and employer admin tooling.
• Own and evolve the design system, maturing components, patterns, and principles so they scale with the company and defining when a deeper rethink is warranted.
• Shape product direction by partnering with the founder and product team, framing problems, and proposing strategic directions rather than waiting for specified requirements.
• Make complex workflows feel simple, including HRIS integration setup, flow-of-funds visibility, invoice and reconciliation, and benefit administration interfaces.
• Get close to users by running qualitative and quantitative research, conducting usability tests and interviews, and translating insights into design decisions.
• Elevate craft by raising clarity, quality, and cohesion across everything Clasp ships for experiences that matter to careers and finances.
• Infuse delight and personality into the product, introducing moments of warmth and humanity that build trust across operational surfaces.
• Leverage AI workflows to responsibly accelerate research, ideation, and design production, making the process smarter, faster, and more scalable.
• Define accessibility and interaction standards, ensuring interfaces are inclusive, legible, and trustworthy for all users.
• Collaborate with engineering to translate design intent into production-ready artifacts while advocating for design quality and consistency.
• Partner with marketing and recruiter platform leaders to align campaigns, landing pages, and touchpoints with the core product experience.
• Contribute to strategic hiring and tooling decisions that enable the design function to scale effectively.
• Measure the impact of design through qualitative and quantitative signals and iterate based on observed user behavior and outcomes.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional product design experience with a strong portfolio demonstrating end-to-end ownership.
• Demonstrated ability to define design systems, design language, and brand foundations from scratch in a growing organization.
• Fluency in designing complex, data-rich, and compliance-sensitive workflows while maintaining clarity and trust.
• Experience working across both product surfaces and marketing sites, ensuring a coherent journey for candidates, students, and administrators.
• Strong collaboration skills with founders, executive leaders, product managers, engineers, and partner teams.
• Comfort making high-leverage decisions about brand and product identity without precedent or existing guidance.
• A bias for action, combining hands-on design execution with strategic thinking and long-term vision.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills to articulate design rationale and influence across the organization.

Nice to have

• Experience in fintech, edtech, or workforce development spaces.
• Background in AI-assisted design workflows and responsible integration of emerging tools.
• Contributions to open design systems or public design leadership in the industry.

Practical notes

• Remote role in Eastern Time and Central Time zones only; some travel may be required.
• Full-time engagement.

This role is for a hands-on Principal Product Designer who will define the design discipline at Clasp while shipping impactful work and building a scalable design foundation. You will own both strategy and execution, working across marketing, product, and engineering to create a trusted, cohesive experience for students, recruiters, and employers. The position requires comfort with ambiguity, a strong point of view, and the ability to make foundational decisions in a fast-moving, mission-driven environment. If you are passionate about education, economic mobility, and designing for meaningful life moments, this is an opportunity to set the standard for design at a growing fintech company tackling student debt and workforce transformation.