Lead Designer
You will be accountable for MUI's design execution and a small team of designers.
Details of the Role
- Location: Remote (preference for UTC-6 to UTC+5).
- Type of work: Full-time (contractor or employee depending on circumstances).
- Level: 4 or above.
- We're a remote company, operating mostly asynchronously (written communication over meetings).
About the company
MUI started with Material UI, the most successful React implementation of Google's Material Design. We have gained a large following, thanks to our focus on Material Design fidelity, our obsession with details, on offering a large number of components, our community engagement, and by carefully improving the DX. Today, countless teams and organizations rely on our open-source libraries to build their design system.
A couple of years ago, we started to expand our suite of products. We released MUI X, a collection of advanced components; MUI Design kits, the MUI components available for Figma, Sketch, etc.; and also host Templates, a set of pre-built UI kits. We've seen rapid growth with all of them (2-3x per year) and we have more to come. We are building a low-code platform for developers to significantly increase the speed and lower the barrier for creating simple CRUD/dashboard UIs with MUI's libraries.
We are a fully distributed team, spread across multiple time zones. We work mainly asynchronously, relying mostly on written collaboration. Every contributor has the freedom to define how they work — the rest of us won't know what you're doing day-to-day unless you tell us. For additional details about the MUI team and culture, you can check our careers and about pages and also our public Handbook.
Why we're hiring
Both our open-source community and our premium products are growing fast (x2 YoY). We need talented people to keep that going!
We are aiming to make high-end design accessible to the many, empowering developers that lack access to a designer as well as saving time for designers with a source they can trust. According to our last survey, the quality of the design execution (UX & UI) is the most important criteria used by developers & designers to pick their next UI library.
Why this is interesting
Our products empower React developers to build amazing applications faster – we see millions of developers on MUI's docs every year, one million a month.
However, despite Material UI – our biggest library – being the leading UI design system in the frontend space, its adoption is only at 25%. More importantly, our challenges go way beyond the ones of design systems.
We envision a future where MUI becomes the default toolkit for web developers to create UIs. It's why we've been expanding our offering with Joy UI, MUI Base, and MUI Toolpad. Design is foundational to achieving this goal.
About the role
What you'll do on a day-to-day basis
As a designer, you will:
- Ensure high-quality UI and UX across teams, libraries, components, and product strategy
- Collaborate with product managers and engineers to ensure that design work is aligned with business goals and user needs
- Create design concepts, prototypes, and high-fidelity mockups for projects on the X, Core, and Toolpad teams
- Update and implement new components on the Core, X, and Toolpad teams
- Develop and maintain MUI's own design system and style guide
- Oversee the design kits production, ensuring they're aligned with engineering implementation
As a team leader, you will:
- Manage the design process, including user research, user flows, and user testing
- Review design work and provide feedback to ensure overall design quality and consistency, with consideration to both UI and UX
- Set goals, priorities, and distribute tasks for the design team
- Provide mentorship and support to the design team members
- Hire and retain a great team
About you
We're looking for someone with an expert eye for both UI and UX design. Details matter to you.
You're a leader who can support and guide a small but growing design team.
And, it's also important that you have enough development skills – CSS, JSX, Git, etc. – to communicate effectively with engineers, product managers, and ultimately, to be accountable for the quality of the design implemented.
Skills you should have
- Expert-level UI knowledge. You can craft great-looking designs, spotting tiny details most people wouldn't pay attention to.
- Expert-level UX knowledge. You can build intuitive solutions, both high and low-level ones. You care about the entire user journey as well as an interaction with a specific component.
- Sharp written and verbal communication skills. Communicating clearly is fundamental to create and manage high-quality products and teams. You'll interface with our team, community members, enterprise customers and also contribute to user documentation.
- Managerial abilities. You have either managed a team before or are feeling ready to start now. You've shown that you're a design leader at heart and can provide the needed guidance and support to other designers.
- Comfortable around design systems. You've worked on one before and have experienced the challenges of developing it.
- Enough development autonomy. Our products are essentially code. Knowing how to navigate through code is key to understanding MUI products and collaborating with engineers. You know how to work with CSS (mainly CSS-in-JS), JSX, and Git.
What would be nice if you had, but isn't required
- Experience with open-source projects. You have seen the particular product dynamics when in an OSS environment and are knowledgable of the challenges.
Benefits & Compensation
Competitive compensation depending on the profile and location. We are ready to pay top market rates for a person that can clearly exceed the role's expectations. You can find the other perks & benefits on the careers page.
Interview steps
Here's a brief overview of how this role's process will be carried through:
- Introduction call (20 to 25 min): A short call to quickly introduce each other.
- Career deep dive (40 to 60 min ⎯ with a designer): We'll go through your career a bit more in-depth and will be interested in understanding your trajectory up to the point where you've applied to this role.
- Comparable experience review (40 to 60 min ⎯ with a designer, product manager or tech lead): We'll deep dive into a presentation of relevant past experiences to understand your approach to problem-solving and design.
- Conversation with the CEO (60 min): A quick call so you get to know each other, and talk about vision, future, history, etc.
We like to encourage candidates to also see all of these conversations as opportunities for you to interview us as well. It's highly encouraged to bring whatever questions you see fit to make sure we are also a great role for you, making for a great match!