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Principal Product Designer

External
Yahoo logoYahoo · US
Full-timeHybridToday
AndroidFigmaiOSMentoringSEO
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About the role

As Principal Product Designer for Yahoo Home, you will set the visual and interaction language for one of the most-visited destinations on the web. This is a senior individual contributor role with the autonomy and influence usually reserved for design leaders. You'll partner directly with product, engineering, and the Community team to design the feed, the navigation, the reading experience, and think deeply about the participation surfaces that turn passive readers into active voices. The constraints are real (200M+ users, SEO-critical pages, cross-platform parity, ad-supported business model), but the upside of redefining the homepage of the internet is enormous.

Responsibilities

  • Own the Yahoo Home experience design. Define the cross-platform design language, interaction patterns, and component system for Home on mobile and desktop. Hold the bar for craft on every pixel that ships.
  • Design the bridge to community. Partner closely with the Community team to weave comments, reactions, perspectives, and ranked voices into the Home reading experience. Design the moments where a reader becomes a participant.
  • Balance feed and story. Hold the tension between habit-forming surfaces (the feed, the rail, the personalization layer) and action-oriented destinations (article reading, community participation, contextual depth). Know when to show more and when to get out of the way.
  • Prototype, don't just spec. Use AI-native tools like Figma Make, Claude, or Cursor to compress the time from idea to interactive artifact. Bring working prototypes to design reviews, not static frames.
  • Build Personalization that's Habit-forming. Develop an engaging experience by leveraging AI-driven interest detection and natural language inputs to make surfaces feel personalized, and design the UI patterns that build user trust and transparency around algorithmic recommendations.
  • Set the design culture. Raise the quality bar across the broader Home and Community design surface area by establishing scalable design frameworks, running critiques, and mentoring other designers (IC3/IC4). You'll lead through your craft.
  • Sweat the cross-platform details. Design fluently for iOS, Android, and web. Know when to converge and when to diverge across platforms. Hold the line on consistency without flattening platform identity.
  • Ship fast on high-stakes surfaces. Navigate existing business constraints (SEO, ad units, legacy components) while introducing genuinely new patterns. Thread the needle between stability and startup-speed iteration.
  • What You Look Like
  • Experience. 10+ years in product design, with significant time on consumer products at scale. You've shipped on platforms with millions of daily users and have seen how design decisions compound over time.
  • Terminally Online. Your knowledge of memes and internet vibe shifts is instinctive, not studied. You don't just examine these communities and apps; you live in them.
  • Proven AI Builder. You have a track record of building side projects and functional prototypes using AI agents. You are comfortable figuring out new AI tools without a manual or a guide.
  • Deep Product Sense & Taste. You have strong opinions on why products like Superhuman or Threads succeed or fail. We judge product sense by your judgment on existing products, not just your adherence to a process.
  • Cross-platform fluency. You design natively for mobile and desktop, not as an afterthought. You have strong opinions on responsive systems, touch versus pointer paradigms, and where each platform should lead.
  • Design system depth. You've built or meaningfully extended a design system. You understand tokens, components, and the long-term cost of inconsistency. Yahoo's UDS will feel familiar in spirit.
  • The material job duties and responsibilities of this role include those listed above as well as adhering to Yahoo policies ; exercising sound judgment ; wor

Additional Information

Yahoo serves as a trusted guide for hundreds of millions of people globally, helping them achieve their goals online through our portfolio of iconic products. For advertisers, Yahoo Advertising offers omnichannel solutions and powerful data to engage with our brands and deliver results. A Little About Us Yahoo reaches hundreds of millions of people every day. It's one of the largest canvases on the internet, the front door to news, sports, finance, entertainment, and a growing community of voices. We're reimagining what Home looks like across mobile and desktop: a surface where the best stories rise, sharp perspectives find their audience, and personalization actually feels personal. The exact shape of this is yours to draw.


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