We’re hiring a Product Designer.
At Sanctuary, we’re a different type of product shop. The way we approach building things is more like a restaurant than a traditional agency—we provide our clients with an outspoken sense of layman comfort and hospitality.
Recently, our needs have been changing. We’ve been taking on larger projects, working to solve bigger, more open-ended, and more interesting problems for our clients. These projects have led us to develop our own in-house design practice. We’re hoping to find someone who can be a force multiplier for our three-person design team, and ultimately help us create better products for our clients.
We’ve worked with clients like General Electric, The Light Phone, Herman Miller, Adobe, Dig Inn, and many others. We partner with the best design shops in NYC like Gin Lane, RoAndCo, PlayLab & Human NYC to create world-class user interfaces & digital experiences.
That same thoughtfulness is applied inward, too. We put a ton of intention, experimentation, and effort into our own way of working so that our studio is a sanctuary where strategists, designers, and developers can do their best work.
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How we work:
We believe that there’s a better balance between the poles of freelancing & full time. For that reason, we do things a bit differently:
- Profit-Sharing: Every 12 months, we put aside a portion of profit earned throughout the year to be distributed to every member, through a simple calculation based on the overall team efficiency throughout the year, and time that each team member has been with Sanctuary.
- Remote Friendly: Our team is working remotely until the end of the year, and intend on being remote-friendly when we’re back in the office in 2021. We’re big on asynchronous communication so that everyone has the freedom to work wherever they want. We believe everyone should have the freedom to set the conditions that enables them to do their best work.
- 100% Health Care: Unlike most companies in the USA, we are committed to going over and above the minimum employer contribution in providing at least one of our health care plans free to the employee (which translates to a personal saving of $1000 — $3000 each year).
- Investment Hours: We stop client work most Friday afternoons to spend time working on side projects, learning new technologies, working on art or music projects, and generally taking time for the things we’d usually never make time for.
- Ideas & Products: In our spare studio time, we work to build our own internal products to diversify & bolster our income. We create amazing technology products for our clients, so why not for the studio?
- Premium Fridays: In the spirit of Yvon Chouinard’s Let My People Go Surfing, the last Friday of every month is a day off. We think that well-rested, calm, and thoughtful team members make far better decisions, and 12 extra long weekends each year helps everyone stay focused.
- Start Time Flexibility: We generally start between 8am & 11am every day and do a solid 8 hours. If you’re an early riser or like to sleep in, either works for us!
- Optional 401k: Our payroll provider integrations with Slavic401k to provide Sanctuary employees a way to save for retirement, without all that tax.
- Transparency & Ownership: We release out Profit & Loss statements to the community each year, open source our best ideas, and talk business & money with everyone in the company. We’re proud to run our business with integrity, and for that reason, we default to open with our team & community.
- Anti-bloat & Efficiency: Every business tends toward complexity as time goes on, introducing procedural bloat and middle management. Sanctuary instead employs a lean, flat management structure that can only work in a small, carefully curated team like ours. The outcome: we can move quickly and with precision, while never feeling over-managed.
- We chill too! Whether it’s gallery afternoons, our Halloween parties, Unity code jams on our HTC Vive, or upstate weekends, we do what we can to break up the workweek. Obviously, COVID has limited us from hanging as much as we’d like, but we still find ways to break from our work and do something fun.
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Who we’re looking for:
Right now, we’re looking for a mid-level-or-above Product Designer. This person would spend the majority of their time designing systems intended for web, native & hardware platforms.
Skills-wise, this role is ideal for someone who has design expertise in simplifying complexity but is curious to learn some code and even drive our strategy & client-facing parts of a project.
This person should have at least 3 years of experience designing native & web applications / systems of significant complexity.
The person we’re looking for is confident, personable, and easy to get along with. They’re excited to understand our clients’ needs and distill what they learn into high definition systems that our developers will take with and run. They’re hoping to broaden their skillset and take a lead role in the projects we create together. They’re flexible, but focus on quality above all else.
We believe people with backgrounds or interests in design, art, music, food, or fashion tend to have a well-rounded sense of design & quality — so a variety of hobbies or side projects is a big nice to have!
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Key Competencies:
- Extensive experience using modern interface design tools like Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, Invision, Zeplin, or Principle
- Excellent communication skills, and confidence talking directly with clients and leading projects by working autonomously
- Hands-on / mechanical experience with Illustrator & Photoshop (but they shouldn’t be your tools of choice)
- Comfort with the differences between working in systems like responsive web, and native, and an understanding of the inherent differences between Android & iOS
- A passion for paper sketching, white-boarding, technical strategy, discovery, idea generation, wireframing, information architecture, and prototyping
- An instinct for branding and brand strategy, and a knack for translating those elements to a digital space
- Comfort developing illustrative work like UI icons, etc
- Experience designing and conducting user research, including contextual inquiry and usability testing
- A basic understanding of HTML & CSS technologies, and ideally some hands-on experience
- Clear writer. We value folks who write well and aren’t afraid to take positions; clear writing is a good sign of both
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Nice to Have Competencies:
Our work is dynamic and alive, and for that reason, the below skillsets and mindsets are super useful in our studio.
- Experience designing and facilitating workshops with clients
- Is a systems thinker: can identify unknown/non-obvious factors and constraints that impact a problem and design for that
- After Effects & Premiere Pro, and experience recording and editing video/motion graphics
- Familiarity with React or similar modern JS frameworks
- Photography, copywriting or other asset production chops
- Experience with 3D Graphics like Blender, AutoCAD, Cinema4D or the like
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Our hiring process
Most hiring processes are kept secret until your first conversation with a recruiter. We know how frustrating this is for candidates: “Why can’t you just tell me what the process looks like before I apply?” For that reason, we’d like to share what the process would look like if you were to interview with us:
- If we’d like to learn more about you, we’ll reach out for a first interview.
- A first interview is a 30-minute conversation with one of our designers. Our goal is just to get a sense of your experience, and how you think!
- If we think there’s potential for a mutual fit, we’ll reach out for a second interview — our second interview is an hour long-design challenge. This is highly collaborative—we’re trying to get a sense of what it’s like to collaborate with you! We don’t assign design exercises as homework because this is a lame industry practice.
- If that goes well, we’ll chat with a reference (ideally someone who’s collaborated with your in a professional setting prior).
- If we’re confident that there’s a match between our needs and your experience and work, we’ll send an offer!
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Drop us a line!
If this sounds like a job you’re stoked about, send us a note at hello@sanctuary.computer! Be sure to include:
- A link to your portfolio
- A short blurb on why you’re interested in this role and what makes you a good fit
