Startups

Candle

Core Product Designer

San Francisco, CA, US

Full-time

**What You’ll Do**

**Own core surfaces.** Design and evolve the heart of the Candle experience. This includes the daily challenges, streaks, games, onboarding, discovery, notifications, and more. **Think in systems.** Craft emotional loops, streak mechanics, reward systems, and connection rituals that drive daily engagement. **Ship end-to-end.** From concept → prototype → polished UI → shipped feature. You’ll work directly with founders and engineers to bring ideas live fast.

**Invent new formats, design to market**

Design new interaction patterns for connection and marketing: collaborative canvases, async voice, micro-games, emotional check-ins, rituals, etc. **Obsess over details.** Typography, motion, haptics, micro-interactions, empty states, streak animations, the small things matter here a lot. Every pixel is questioned.

**What We’re Looking For**

  • 2+ years designing and shipping consumer mobile products
  • A portfolio that shows taste, restraint, and strong interaction thinking
  • Deep understanding of mobile UX patterns and emotional design
  • Strong Figma skills (components, systems, prototyping)
  • Ability to prototype interactive flows (bonus: React Native, SwiftUI, Framer, ProtoPie, etc.)
  • High product intuition, you can think like a PM when needed
  • You care about user psychology

Bonus if

  • You’ve worked on social, gaming, or habit-forming products
  • You’ve built and shipped your own app
  • Have done animations with Rive

**Why This Is Different**

  • You’ll work directly with founders and exited founders (Apple, Twitter, NASA engineers, Forbes 30u30 )
  • Your work will be seen by hundreds of thousands within days
  • We ship fast, experiments go live weekly
  • We care deeply about emotional impact, not vanity metrics
  • You’ll help define the design language of a generational consumer brand

If you want to design something people use every single day with someone they love, this is that opportunity.

Sourced 2026-09-30