Rubicon is hiringSenior Product Designer

APPLY HERE: https://www.services.tryrubicon.com/rubicon/online-reports/report/senior-product-designer-winter-2025

Senior Product Designer @ Rubicon 

Full Time | Hybrid (Waterloo / Toronto)

Watch what this role is about

(https://youtu.be/D7M0fo5VBys)

Rubicon is a Public Safety platform with a mission to help police agencies provide exceptional service to our communities. 

We’re a team of 8 and growing! We’re in the Goldilocks zone: real customers, real revenue, and a flat hierarchy where you can ship fast.

We want to accelerate product delivery (there’s so much to build!), so we’re hiring our first product designer to establish the design function and help us build faster and better. You’ll join a small, focused, high‑performing team that works directly with the founders. We offer competitive compensation - salary, performance-based bonus, and equity (we’re bootstrapped but growing like a startup). We want you to do the best work of your career here, so you should expect high autonomy, high expectations, and ownership.

What you will work on

As Rubicon’s first product designer, you will establish and lead Rubicon’s design function. You will work across all applications, tools, and features in the Rubicon platform.

You will own projects from start to finish, working closely with users and engineers to deliver high-quality solutions at a high velocity. With a detailed, well-thought-out design, our engineers can work exceptionally quickly by leveraging AI-assisted coding (and yes, we expect you to use AI to aid your designs).

Your projects will fall into several categories:

• Current platform UI audit – review all applications, flows, and UIs to thoroughly understand the platform, create a digital “design twin” in Figma, and recommend standards to unify the UI, then work with engineers to implement them.

• Redesigning existing features – when users identify problematic flows or features, you’ll redesign them, test the designs with users where applicable, hand them to engineering, and QA the final deliverable.

• Designing new features – create new flows and interfaces within existing applications.

• Designing new applications – work with founders and SMEs to design completely new applications within the platform.

• Marketing & website – review our marketing copy and website to ensure they are consistent with the company’s design system (a broader website refresh is slated for Q1 2026).

Your Skills

Have high agency and urgency → you can independently take a messy, ambiguous problem and turn it into a shipped experience. You’re comfortable talking to users, digging through our existing workflows, and unblocking yourself instead of waiting for perfect requirements.

Have top-notch async/written skills → you communicate your thinking clearly through docs, Slack videos, and Figma comments. You can summarize a problem, show options with tradeoffs, and give engineers what they need without a meeting. You default to async, but you’re great live too.

Are a product design generalist with strong UX craft → you have 5+ years designing complex web applications (B2B, internal tools, or similar). You’ve shipped flows end-to-end: research, user journeys, wireframes, prototypes, production-ready UI, and design QA.

Put in the effort → you don’t need heroic 80-hour weeks, but you do bring 40+ hours of focused work a week. In practice, that likely means an evening or two some weeks, and a day on a weekend every so often (for example, once a month) as we push toward launches. This is a startup, so the effort and pace are high, which is not for everyone. You consistently move projects from “almost there” to “in production,” and you treat follow-through (specs, QA, polish) as part of the job, not an afterthought.

Design solutions, not just screens → Specs won’t spell out every detail. You can clarify the problem, propose alternatives, make product calls when needed, and design flows that fit well with our existing product and tech constraints.

Are pragmatic and systems-minded → you know when to quickly mock something up and when to invest in the design system. You can balance “fix the UX,” “ship the feature,” and “improve the system underneath.” You see AI as a tool to speed up exploration (copy, variants, flows), not a threat to your craft.

Level up our team → you’re excited to be the first designer and to put simple design rituals in place: shared Figma libraries, lightweight reviews, before/after demos. You help engineers and founders think more like designers by explaining the “why,” not just handing off files.

How We work

We work in short, focused cycles with a strong bias toward shipping.

• Weekly cadence, not endless projects

We ship on a weekly cadence. If a project or milestone is bigger than a week, we break it into small, shippable slices that can be deployed and tested. If a project risks slipping, we cut scope rather than dragging it out so that every weekly cycle still ships value.

• Lightweight rituals, high signal

We do a quick check-in mid-week and reserve Fridays for “all-hands-on-deck” time across teams — implementations, sales, and a longer engineering + design session. These are about unblocking, making decisions, and lining things up for the next week, not status theater. Throughout the week, you control your own schedule, setting meetings with engineers and users as needed.

• Direction over rigid roadmaps

We keep a clear sense of where we’re heading, but we avoid hyper-detailed, long-term roadmaps. Every month, we reassess priorities based on what we’ve learned from customers and what’s happening in the field, then decide what’s next.

• Small, independent builders

We prefer a small team of people who love their craft over a large team with layers of management. You’ll work directly with founders and engineers, with a lot of autonomy to shape problems and see your work ship quickly.

• Ship minimal, high-quality first

Our goal is to get a minimal, high-quality version in front of users, then refine based on real feedback. As a designer, you’ll help define what that “minimum lovable” version looks like and ensure it’s coherent, polished, and usable.

• Close to our users

This will be our first dedicated product design role, so we’re intentionally making space for user research. That means ride-alongs to police stations, observing how officers and staff use the system, running virtual usability sessions, and turning those insights into better product decisions.

If you enjoy tight feedback loops, high ownership, and seeing your work in production every week (not every quarter), you’ll feel at home here.

More about Rubicon Platform

The current policing model in North America (in-person response to all calls, highly manual internal workflows, and growing sophistication of crime investigations) is very resource-intensive. Agencies are constantly in catch-up mode, going call to call and often overlooking low-priority crimes (e.g., shoplifting, mischief), which make up more than half of incidents reported to police.

At Rubicon, we want to change this. Our mantra is “No call is too small for proper police response.” We’re building a software platform that helps law enforcement agencies stand up Virtual Policing operations that use digital technology — online reporting, SMS, phone calls, booking, virtual calls — with AI assistance to speed up and improve their response to low-priority incidents. We have officers who are doing 5× more work (processing incidents, laying charges, and writing warrants) than their peers on foot patrol, which is a game-changer for modern policing.

The Rubicon platform consists of the following tools:

• RubiREPORT provides modern online reporting for non-emergency incidents, via web and mobile forms and soon through AI voice reporting. Citizens and partners (e.g., retailers, schools, health providers) can submit structured reports with photos and documents, while records staff review, triage, and route them using configurable workflows.

• RubiMESSAGE (SMS console) lets call-takers push unique report links and simple status updates, reducing repeat calls and speeding migration from phone calls to online self-service.

• RubiREGISTRY powers self-service registries for vulnerable persons, cameras, bicycles, alarms, and similar programs. Citizens can self-update their information; officers and dispatch get map-based and card-style views of registrants during calls and investigations.

• RubiALERT manages bulletins and BOLOs, with standardized templates and targeted sharing across units and agencies, plus search tools, image tagging, and AI similarity ranking that make bulletins easy to find and act on.

Across all modules, Rubicon layers in practical AI (e.g., auto-generated report narratives, similarity search, image tagging) and delivers implementation, integration, and training services to ensure agencies can launch quickly, realize measurable improvements in service delivery, and scale digital channels without adding staff.

Compensation & Benefits

Total compensation for this role is $110,000–$140,000. This includes up to a 20% bonus component based on personal and company performance, plus stock options (equity), which provide a long-term upside as the company grows.

Additionally, you will have 3 weeks of vacation + 1 additional week of company-wide vacation during the winter holidays. A cherry on top: we aim for at least one annual company retreat for a multi-day hackathon.

Next Steps - Application process

We hope the detail in this doc gave you a good sense of who we are and what we’re working on. Our goal was to make it an efficient use of your time. If you found yourself nodding along while reading, we’d love to hear from you.

1. Apply (hear back within 7 days)

   • Fill out the application and record a short informal video of yourself.

   • Yes, we review all applications!

2. Design interview session (hear back within 4 days)

   • A 30-minute, rapid-fire conversation about your design knowledge and approach.

3. Work on a paid project

   • A 10-hour project that you’ll complete over a span of a week (we will accommodate your schedule if you are working). This will mimic what it is like to work Rubicon (this is a great time to evaluate whether we are a good fit for each other)

4. Design review session (hear back within 2 days)

   • A 45-minute chat with our team to discuss your product decisions, design implementation, and ideas for the future.

5. Receive offer & get to know the team

   • Chat with Rubicon members across the company. Talk through how we work, your offer, and any questions you have.

Apply here: https://www.services.tryrubicon.com/rubicon/online-reports/report/senior-product-designer-winter-2025