Core Product Designer

Candle’s mission is to end loneliness.

We are a daily game designed to help close friends and couples stay emotionally connected. Each day, you and someone you care about unlock a shared random challenge. It could be a thoughtful question, a funny debate, a photo or drawing prompt, a mini-game, even a local date idea or activity.

One shared moment a day to laugh, reflect, and grow together.

We envision a world where everyone is paired with the ~8–9 people who matter most in their lives.

In under 12 months, with a full-time team of just four, we're now at:

• 1m+ users
• $3M+ in annualized revenue

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.

Technologies We Use:

• React Native (Expo) and Swift UI for the client facing app (iOS and Android)
• Convex for the real-time backend (written in Typescript), including all background tasks, queues, cron jobs, and REST APIs
• Anthropic (Claude Opus 4.6), OpenAI (GPT 5.2), and Gemini models to create background agents for tasks like finding local date ideas. We also use Replicate for some image gen models.
• Observability: Posthog for feature flags, Amplitude for analytics, and Sentry for error reporting
• Clerk for user auth(z/n)
• We strongly encourage all candidates to have their own AI setup of choice when coding (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) to ship faster. Bonus points if you know how to use Git worktrees to speed up your workflow!
• Sample projects of what you could be working on include: overhauling our entire daily notifications setup into a separate reliable microservice, designing and implementing real-time features like a collaborative canvas or a “walkie talkie” feature, creating a recommendation algorithm to dynamically suggest content for couples to explore (this one would be really useful!), etc.

• 30 min intro call with founders
• 1 hour portfolio deep dive
• Design exercise (focused on product thinking)
• Final round, strategy + collaboration