Senior Staff Product Designer

October 15, 2026

Senior

Description

Apartment List is hiring a Senior Staff Product Designer to lead Core, the company's largest product surface spanning ApartmentList.com, mobile web, and native iOS and Android. This is a hands-on seat: decide what Core takes on, design it, prototype it in code, and set the craft bar other senior designers calibrate against. The role is AI-forward, with prototypes built in Cursor and Claude Code wired to real components, variables, and tokens. Compensation is $165,000–$223,000 TTC plus equity depending on location zone.

Responsibilities

Lead the renter experience across web, mobile web, and native iOS and Android, accountable for its coherence, quality, and direction
Balance maintenance and invention: improve what exists as much as you build what's next on a surface with real traffic and revenue
Set the craft bar: visual, interaction, and systems, creating the patterns and standards other senior designers calibrate against
Prototype in Cursor and Claude Code until it's functionally real, wired to actual components, variables, and tokens so engineering builds from your prototype
Make AI a default part of how you work, folding new tools into your process the week they land
Bring a point of view on where Core should head, grounded in renters, data, and taste, and get senior product, engineering, and executive partners behind it
Find problems nobody handed you, using qualitative and quantitative research and experiments to decide what's worth building
Mentor without managing: raise the level of every designer you work with through critique, pairing, and example

Requirements

10+ years designing digital products, owning ambiguous, cross-functional problems with minimal direction
You build with AI in real work: shipped working prototypes or production code with tools like Cursor or Claude Code, and can say what the AI got right and where it fell short
You've shipped on both web and native mobile, and you think mobile-first
Your work has scaled beyond you: a framework, pattern library, starter kit, or standard that other designers or teams adopted
Craft you can show: Figma fluency (auto layout, components, variables, systems), plus visual design, typography, interaction, and motion that others copy
You act without being told: you spot problems, decide, follow through to resolution, and know when to say no
Nice to have: a two-sided marketplace at real scale
Nice to have: partnering directly with C-suite leaders on product direction
Nice to have: a side project taken from idea to launch