Head of Design

Product, brand, and visual identity

About Blacksky Algorithms

Blacksky Algorithms is building an interconnected suite of products reshaping how people connect, participate, organize, and transact online.

At the center is Blacksky, an open-source social network powered by the AT Protocol. Alongside it, we operate Acorn, community management software that plugs into the social network, and are building Blacksky Cash, a peer-to-peer payments app that is interoperable with both Acorn and Blacksky.

The products serve different needs, but share a common vision: giving people and communities more control, flexibility, and agency over how they connect and participate online.

About the role

We’re looking for a Head of Design to lead and shape how our products and brands look, feel, and work.

This is a highly hands-on role for a multidisciplinary designer who is equally comfortable thinking through complex product experiences and developing compelling visual identities. You’ll play a central role in shaping everything from how people discover, connect, communicate, and participate on Blacksky to how our products and brands present themselves across websites, marketing, communications, and other public-facing touchpoints.

We’re looking for someone with strong consumer product instincts, excellent interaction design skills, and a distinctive visual point of view. You should be comfortable starting with ambiguity, exploring multiple directions, developing creative concepts, and moving fluidly between big-picture design strategy and hands-on execution.

This is an opportunity to have meaningful influence across a growing portfolio of technology products, including a social app on a network of 45 million users. You’ll work closely with product, engineering, community, and our founder, with significant ownership over both the experiences we build and the visual direction of the company.

What you’ll do

Product (80%)

• – Lead end-to-end design for Blacksky’s core mobile-first social experience, from early concepts and user flows through polished, shipped experiences
• – Own product design direction across our broader portfolio, including Acorn, our community management software, and Blacksky Cash, our peer-to-peer payments product, adapting design approaches to different users and contexts
• – Turn ambiguous problems into clear flows through research, prototyping, and iteration. Talk to community members. Ship, then learn
• – Build and maintain the design system engineering builds against, and hold the bar on what ships
• – Partner with engineering early. Our stack is open source, and our engineers move fast; designs that account for real constraints ship faster

Brand and marketing (20%)

• – Evolve Blacksky’s visual identity and give Acorn and Blacksky Cash identities that read as one family
• – Produce the marketing material: social media graphics and edits, fliers, out-of-home, event collateral, presentation decks, and web assets
• – Write brand guidelines a non-designer on the team can follow when you’re not in the room

Building the function

• – Establish how design works here: critique, handoff, review cadence
• – Tell us when we need more design capacity, and help hire it

What we’re looking for

• – 4+ years designing consumer digital products, mobile-first, with a portfolio of shipped work that shows end-to-end ownership
• – Strong graphic and visual design craft alongside interaction design: typography, composition, hierarchy, and the discipline to keep it consistent across surfaces
• – Experience developing or evolving a visual identity, ideally for more than one product or brand
• – Product judgment. You can hold user needs, business constraints, and technical reality in the same decision
• – Comfortable being the only designer. You scope your own work, ask for what you need, and don’t wait for a brief
• – Clear communicator who can explain a design decision to an engineer, a community moderator, and the founder in one sitting
• – Based in New York City and able to work from our Brooklyn office at least 3 days a week

Nice to have

• – Experience on social, community, messaging, feeds, or payments products
• – Design systems work
• – Motion, microanimation, or video editing for social
• – Enough HTML and CSS to prototype in code or read a pull request
• – Familiarity with open source, decentralized technology, or the ATmosphere

Who this isn’t for

• – Folks looking to manage a team on day one. This is a hands-on seat for the foreseeable future
• – Designers who need a mature product org, a dedicated researcher, or a PM handing over specs

Compensation and logistics

• – $100,000–$150,000 base depending on experience, plus equity
• – Full-time. Hybrid, minimum 3 days a week from our office in Brooklyn
• – Reports to the Founder & CEO

How to apply

Apply below with a link to your portfolio and a short note on one thing you’ve designed that you’re proud of and what you’d change about it now. A portfolio is required; a degree is not. If this sounds like you and you don’t check every box, apply anyway.

Blacksky Algorithms is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of any legally protected characteristic.