Senior Product Designer, Connect

About Us

Chess.com is one of the largest gaming sites in the world and the #1 platform for playing, learning, and enjoying chess.

We are a team of 600+ fully remote people in 60+ countries working hard to serve the global chess community. We are here to support 250M+ chess players worldwide with the best possible product, content, and tools to serve the community!

We are a tech company. A gaming company. A content company. And we do it all with passion and commitment to the game. Above all we prize our mission-driven, flat, life-celebrating, no-corporate culture, and we look forward to meeting you and learning more about what you can bring to the team.

About the Role

As a Senior Product Designer in Connect, you’ll lead the design of high-impact experiences for some of our most important and visible features like Home, Profile, Notifications, Widgets, Friends, Messages, Sharing, and more.

Your work will span cross-functionally where different features meet and overlap and you will partner closely with Product, Engineering, and other Product Designers to craft an engaging and cohesive experience across web, iOS, and Android for millions of players across the world.

You'll identify opportunities beyond the brief, and influence product and design decisions while helping raise the craft quality bar across the team.

About You

You’re an experienced Product Designer with strong visual craft, product judgment, and the confidence to influence how a product takes shape. You think beyond the feature in front of you, considering how decisions connect across product experiences. You’re comfortable navigating ambiguity and competing perspectives, present your thinking with clarity and composure, and help other designers improve through thoughtful critique.

You’re interested in how people connect and find joy in designing fun and healthy ways for them to build relationships and feel like part of a global community.

What You’ll Do

- Lead the end-to-end design of high-impact product experiences across Chess.com ’s web, iOS, and Android apps, and deliver polished, production-ready UI designs.

- Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Design, and other stakeholders to shape requirements, clarify ambiguity, and influence product and design direction.

- Design how players connect, socialize, and feel like they’re part of a global community on key features like Home, Profile, Friends, Messaging, Notifications, Leaderboards, and more.

- Think horizontally across features and the broader design system, identifying opportunities to improve consistency, usability, and quality across the product.

- Raise the craft bar through strong UI design, thoughtful interactions, and sound product judgment grounded in context, heuristics, and user insight.

- Proactively identify meaningful product opportunities beyond the immediate brief and help move them from idea to well-articulated design direction.

- Present your design proposals and clearly articulate your decisions, navigate differing perspectives, and help cross-functional partners align to reach strong decisions.

- Build and iterate on high-fidelity prototypes using our Design System, using tools like Cursor and Claude, to explore directions and accelerate decision making.

- Contribute to design critiques, provide constructive feedback to other Product Designers, and help strengthen the quality of the team’s work without direct people-management responsibility.

- Maintain design ownership through implementation and help ensure strong design-to-code alignment across platforms.

Skills / Qualifications

- 5+ years of experience working as a Product Designer on a consumer-facing product or game.

- A portfolio of polished web and mobile UI design work that demonstrates excellent craft, strong product thinking, and accountability.

- Mastery of UI design fundamentals, including typography, color, layout, visual hierarchy, alignment, contrast, interactivity, user experience heur