Staff Product Designer, UI/UX

General Information:

Job Title: Staff Product Designer, UI/UX

Location: Toronto (Hybrid: 3 days per week in our Toronto office)

Job Type: Full-Time

Hiring Timeline: Immediate

Reporting Line: Chief Executive Officer

Existing Vacancy: Yes

Application Deadline: Open until Filled

Level: Staff, on the professional track. This is a hands-on design leadership role with no direct reports: you lead through the work, the standards you set, and the decisions you drive.

Team: Crossdock Studios, working primarily on Workbench alongside Product, Engineering, and Operations Research.

Salary Range:
$145,000 - $170,000 CAD base per year, plus a standard equity grant if and where eligible.

Role Overview

We're looking for a Staff Product Designer to own the design of Workbench, our decision-intelligence platform for warehouse and fulfillment system design, inside Crossdock Studios. You'll own design end-to-end across the full lifecycle - from early concept and user research through wireframes, prototypes, and polished, production-ready UI, setting the direction on ambiguous, early-stage problems and partnering closely with product managers and engineers to turn them into simple, intuitive experiences.

Workbench turns warehouse design into a structured optimization and simulation problem: users make tightly coupled trade-offs across layout, labour planning, automation selection, capacity sizing, throughput targets and service-level commitments, then stress-test those designs under real-world variability. That means dozens of interdependent inputs, constraints and scenario controls on a single screen. Presented sub-optimally, user adoption can drop; presented well, it makes expert judgement faster and more rigorous. Your job is to make that complexity feel obvious.

This is a Staff-level role: you'll move fluidly between research, interaction design, visual design, and design systems work, depending on what the product needs at any given moment. You'll also establish the standards and practices Crossdock designs by, and raise the design bar with the product and engineering partners you work alongside. You'll thrive here if you enjoy the challenge of designing for products that don't exist yet and want real influence over how they take shape. You will set the design direction for Workbench from first principles rather than execute someone else's, argue trade-offs directly with Product, Engineering and Operations Research, and be the person in the room who decides what goes on the screen and what comes off it.

What You'll Do:

• Research & Discovery: Plan and run user interviews, synthesize findings, and translate insights into design decisions the team can act on.
• UX Design: Map user journeys and flows, build wireframes and prototypes, and iterate based on feedback and usability testing.
• UI Design: Create polished, high-fidelity mockups and visual designs that are consistent, accessible, and on-brand.
• Design Systems: Own and evolve the design system for a web-first engineering tool, setting the component architecture, interaction patterns and conventions that hold dense, control-heavy interfaces together as the product grows. The bar is a system complete enough that engineers can build from it without asking.
• Collaboration: Partner closely with PMs and engineers throughout the product lifecycle - from early concept through implementation and QA.
• Prototyping: Build interactive prototypes to test concepts before development investment.
• Cross-functional Communication: Present design rationale and decisions clearly to senior stakeholders and clients, building alignment across technical and non-technical partners alike.
• Mentorship & Craft: Define and hold the studio's standards for research rigor, accessibility, and visual craft, run design critiques, and mentor designers as the team grows.
• Information Architecture & Progressive Disclosure: Structure dense, multi-variable interfaces so users see what matters now and reach the rest on demand. Decide what is surfaced, grouped, defaulted, or hidden, and defend those calls with reasoning.
• Design for Uncertainty & Trade-offs: Make optimization output, scenario comparison, constraint conflicts and confidence legible to operators and executives who are not modellers, including how conflicts surface, how they are resolved, and what gets recorded when they are.
• Design Direction & First Principles: Bring multiple credible approaches to a problem, weigh them against precedent and best practice, and set the pattern the rest of the portfolio follows.

Requirements

What We're Looking For:

• 8+ years designing digital products, including at least 3 years as the design owner for a complex enterprise or technical web product end-to-end.
• Demonstrated depth in data-dense, web-first product design. A portfolio with at least one product where the core challenge was complexity itself: many interdependent controls, large data volumes, or expert workflows.
• Evidence of multiple design approaches to the same hard problem, with clear reasoning for the one chosen and what was traded away.
• Experience designing decision-support, analytics, simulation, planning, or configuration-heavy tools (for example dashboards, modelling tools, industrial or scientific software, or complex internal platforms).
• A strong portfolio demonstrating end-to-end design work (research, flows, wireframes, prototypes, and finished UI) with clear evidence of your design judgment and the outcomes it drove.
• Advanced proficiency with Figma, including component architecture, variables, and interactive prototypes built for validation.
• Deep understanding of usability principles and accessibility standards (WCAG), and the ability to hold others to them.
• Experience building, owning, or significantly extending a design system.
• Experience leading design in fast-moving B2B or SaaS product environments, including 0-to-1 work under ambiguity.
• Experience setting design standards for a team or product and giving actionable critique.
• Eligible to work in Canada.

Nice to Have:

• Experience leveraging AI tools to accelerate design work e.g., using AI for generating mockups, building out or maintaining design systems, speeding up iteration, or exploring concepts faster and with higher quality.
• Familiarity with how engineers consume design specs (tokens, component APIs, handoff tooling) so the system you define is buildable.
• Exposure to supply chain, logistics, manufacturing, or other operational domains. Domain knowledge is welcome but not required; we will teach the domain, we cannot teach design judgement.
• Knowledge of responsive design best practices is a plus.

What Success Looks Like in the First 90 Days:

30 Days In

• Ramped up on Crossdock's product portfolio, current design system, and existing Figma libraries/component patterns.
• Shadowed active projects to understand how the team moves from research through to shipped UI, and met the cross-functional partners (Product, Engineering, Marketing).
• Delivered at least one well-scoped piece of design work end-to-end to get familiar with the review and handoff process, and surfaced early observations on where the design practice can improve.

60 Days In

• Independently owned the design for a product area or workflow end-to-end - from research and wireframes through high-fidelity UI - with minimal oversight from the Senior Product Manager.
• Contributing meaningfully to the shared component library/design system and proposing improvements to how it's structured and governed.
• Established trusted working relationships with engineering (handing off specs a developer can build from without repeated clarification).

90 Days In

• Leading design on one or more product areas autonomously, including setting the research approach and driving decisions with Product and Engineering leadership.
• Demonstrated ability to prioritize and balance multiple in-flight design requests across Product, Engineering, and Marketing stakeholders without escalation.
• Design output consistently meets the quality bar without significant rework, and the design standards you set are being applied consistently across the product.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

• Usability outcomes: Task-completion and time-to-decision for the product flows you own, measured with design-partner users, not screens shipped.
• Design system adoption: Share of new screens built from system components without custom design work.
• Engineering self-sufficiency: Reduction in design clarification requests and handoff rework from Engineering.
• IA adoption: Target information architecture agreed by Product, Engineering and Operations Research and implemented across the product.
• Stakeholder trust: Qualitative feedback from Product, Engineering, Operations Research and design partners on the clarity and rigour of design decisions.
• Standards impact: Adoption of the design standards and practices you establish across the product team.

Perks you'll appreciate:

• Employee Health: Comprehensive health and dental coverage for you and your family
• Time Off: Competitive paid time off and flexible leave policies
• Retirement: Retirement savings programs and employer contributions
• Professional Growth: Dedicated learning and development budget
• Flexible Work: Hybrid work options
• Perks: Equipment allowances, internet reimbursements, business travel coverage, and employee stock options (ESOP), where applicable.
• Community Engagement: Team events, meetups, and company offsites