Upwork ($UPWK) is the leading tech solution for companies looking to hire the best talent, maintain flexibility, and get more done. We’re passionate about our mission to create economic opportunities so people have better lives. Every year, more than $2 billion of work is done through Upwork by skilled professionals who want the freedom of working anytime, anywhere. Top companies connecting with extraordinary talent around the globe? Upwork is how.

Timing is not everything. But, it does have a huge influence on your opportunity to grow. And, right now, Upwork is in a special place with a rich environment for you to grow. Globally, companies are re-evaluating how, with whom, and where they stage their workforce. And, they're looking to us to help them figure it out. This is a fantastic time to join Upwork.

As a key leader on the Upwork Experience Team covering our Acquisition and Onboarding domain, we'll lean on you to help us start our customers on the right path. We'll look to you to draw upon our stellar team of researchers, writers, and designers to show our customers a new way of working. A new way of respecting humans in a consistent fashion from the first moment they learn about Upwork. Don't remain an environment that holds back your growth. Reset your potential with a team that is fully embedded throughout the product development lifecycle. We'll empower you with the modern tools, mentalities and methods to bring your best. We'll support you with a strong design culture to design products and features that help millions of users collaborate with distributed teams.

Your Responsibilities:

• Lead design strategy for the early stages of the customer experience, guiding Talent and Clients through to their very first moments of value.
• Be responsible for a team of designers and a design manager.
• Drive design projects consisting of several product features and touchpoints from ideation, research and execution
• Be accountable for high quality design practices. This includes participation in all aspects of UX: research, ideation, strategy, interaction design, information architecture and visual design
• Remain current with trends in product and design for work, collaboration, reporting and complex interactions
• Create a variety of design assets to communicate your concepts to a broad range of partners and end users; ranging from strategy and experience concepts to detailed design systems and assets
• Collaborate with product, services, engineering and operations partners; produce design solutions, and adapt your designs to emerging constraints
• Multitask and manage multiple small to large projects in a cross-functional environment
• Mentor designers early in their career; lead small teams of designers when needed
• Facilitate cross-functional decision making using design-thinking methods
• Be a subject matter expert in the area of UX/UI design for super-user personas
• Establish a fun, supportive, collaborative environment to bring out the best work from your team.
• Skills and experience in user research, ideation, information architecture and product definition

What it takes to catch our eye:

• 8+ years of proven experience as a UX designer UX team, dedicated to the complete UX design and development lifecycle of several successfully launched desktop or mobile applications
• proven experience designing products for search or categories
• ***Portfolio is required*** Please send with application.

How to really knock our socks off:

• Thoughtful balance of product requirements, user needs and growth opportunities to scale product adoption and engagement
• Ability to work seamlessly with product, engineers, operations and customers
• Architect system wide design solutions that satisfy both product and engineering requirements
• Skills and experience in interaction design and visual design
• Demonstrated history of delivering high-quality product experiences for a variety of platforms including desktop, web and mobile
• Strong work ethic with the drive and willingness to work side-by-side with your team when they need mentorship.
• Deep understanding of the freelancer persona, enterprise landscape and unlocking adoption and growth within an organization
• An entrepreneurial spirit and creativity that fuels your capacity for building and growing business - we love seeing those side projects and design experiments