Product Designer

About Us

At any given time, 15 million Americans are experiencing a crisis that requires urgent help from our legal system or government. The right assistance could transform their lives. But today, most never get it. Atticus is a startup on a mission to change that.

We use a marketplace model to bridge the gap between the many ordinary people who need legal help and the few great lawyers who provide it. To our clients, we're the legal equivalent of a primary care doctor: We diagnose their issue, advise them on their options, and, if needed, refer them to a specialist — a vetted, top-tier lawyer who can win their case. To lawyers, we operate as a broker: we send them pre-vetted clients and earn a percentage of what they make from each successful representation.

Who are our clients? We’ve helped immigrants facing deportation, employees sexually harassed by their bosses, and drivers hospitalized after awful car accidents. For now, though, our primary focus is on helping disabled people get government benefits. Our customers are among the 15 million American adults who have lost their ability to support themselves due to a severe illness or injury. They’re eligible for life-changing government support — a monthly check and health insurance — but a byzantine system prevents most from qualifying. We help them understand their rights and find the help they need to get benefits.

Atticus was founded in 2018. Our team remains small — we’ll grow from 8 to 16 people this year — but we’ve served thousands of happy customers (see our 400+ 5-star reviews), generated substantial revenue, and raised $5.8 million from top venture capital investors. We’re the first of our kind: a mission-driven firm offering free legal services to ordinary people, driven by new technology and on track to build a huge and profitable business.

The Role

To provide a great experience for a client, we have to do a lot quickly: Understand their situation, identify their needs, give advice, match them with the right lawyer, connect them to that lawyer, convince both parties to work together, and formalize the arrangement — all while doing our best to make a complex and scary system feel simple, accessible, and human. Doing all of that well, in a way that can scale, makes for a huge and fascinating design challenge.

To take on that challenge, we’re hiring our first full-time product designer. You’ll own every aspect of the design process, and eventually build out a team to share the load. This is a big job that requires an unusually diverse skill set and willingness to get your hands dirty, but offers a ton of creative freedom and the chance to make a huge impact. You’ll join at a fun stage: Our products are working well with mediocre design, and you’ll get the chance to rebuild them with an already happy and growing user base to draw on for inspiration and a tight-knit, supportive team around you.

Responsibilities

• Build a new design system from the ground up (that can scale across our products for the foreseeable future).
• Lead end-to-end design work for our core products: conduct research, select features, create wireframes and prototypes, and work with engineers to build and launch.
• Get to know our customers — both clients and lawyers — and understand their goals and needs. Interview people, gather feedback, and review platforms like FullStory to understand behavior.
• Advocate for a lean approach: Help us build and launch new features quickly, then test and iterate. Find other products that have tackled similar problems and draw inspiration from them.
• Work closely with product, engineering, and marketing; communicate openly in a tight-knit team.
• Hire and manage contractors as needed for support, and eventually build out our broader full-time design team

Qualifications

Critical:

• 4+ years experience designing digital products end-to-end
• A strong portfolio and the ability to speak thoughtfully about the decisions that shaped it
• Strong visual design experience, including color, typography, layout, and directing illustrators
• Strong UI/UX design experience, including user research, prototyping, and testing
• Experience working across teams, with limited supervision and a lot of freedom
• Ability to empathize with a diverse user base, including disabled and older users
• Demonstrated commitment to doing good and helping people

Bonus / Nice-to-Have:

• Experience designing complex consumer services and/or two-sided marketplaces
• Experience building a design system from the ground up
• Conceptual understanding (or more) of HTML, CSS, Javascript, and React
• Past work at a fast-growing startup

We have a strong commitment to building a diverse team. If you’re from a background that’s underrepresented in law and tech, we’d particularly love to meet you.

Benefits

This is a rare opportunity to join a startup that has strong traction (substantial funding, great backers, and many happy customers) but is still small enough that you can have a huge impact and play a role in shaping our culture.

We’re a certified B Corporation tackling a critical social problem. Our mission to help needy people drives everything we do, and your work here will touch a lot of lives.

We offer great pay and benefits:

• Health insurance with 100% of premiums covered
• 15 vacation days & ~14 paid holidays each year
• Free memberships to ClassPass, TalkSpace, and OneMedical
• 401(k) and optional HSA
• Free snacks, drinks, weekly lunches, and occasional team dinners/events/retreats
• A beautiful office in LA's Arts District (across from Salt & Straw)
• Free parking or a Metro Pass
• Humble, thoughtful, smart, fun colleagues

Note on COVID-19

In turbulent times, you'd be right to worry about working at a startup. Thankfully though, Atticus will remain strong even if this crisis worsens:

• Since most of our business involves helping people who are out of work, this is a rare field that grows markedly during recessions.
• We recently closed a sizable funding round and won't need to raise again until late 2021.
• Our team already has several employees outside LA, so we’ve built our processes and platforms from the ground up to easily enable remote work.
• For now, we've gone fully remote to protect our team (though we'll return to our office once the crisis is over).
• In keeping with our values, we’ve always offered every team member unlimited sick leave.

As more families are forced to seek help from our nation’s broken social safety net, this work matters more than ever. We're continuing to hire as planned, with accommodations to our process to make sure that everyone involved stays safe.

How to Apply

Use the short form below. Questions? Email hiring@atticus.com.