Principal Product Designer

About this role

PRINCIPAL PRODUCT DESIGNER

REMOTE (ET & CT TIME ZONES ONLY — SOME TRAVEL REQUIRED)

ABOUT US

Clasp is a venture-backed, mission-driven startup transforming access to education and career pathways. We are revolutionizing the way employers attract and retain critical talent and the way colleges and universities support their students through education financing — all while tackling the student debt crisis. (Yep, we think BIG.) We like to think of ourselves as more than a fintech; we're a catalyst for economic mobility.

A Forbes Fintech 50 company, portfolio company of SHRM (Society of Human Resource Management — the world's largest HR professional society), and one of Business Insider's "43 Start-Ups to Bet Your Career On in 2025," Clasp is driven by our commitment to social impact and innovation.

What We Need

Clasp is looking for a Principal Product Designer to define design, brand, and taste across all of our user interactions.. This is a foundational, strategic hire — the person who sets the bar for how Clasp looks, feels, and earns trust, from the first marketing touchpoint a candidate ever sees through the products our users rely on every day.

You will own design as a discipline at Clasp. That means more than shipping screens: it means establishing the visual language, the design culture, and the standard of craft that everything else is measured against. You'll work across both our product surfaces and our marketing site, making sure a student who first encounters Clasp in an ad, lands on our site, signs an offer, and becomes an employee receiving their first repayment feels like they're moving through one coherent, considered, trustworthy experience.

This is a green-field mandate. You are not inheriting a mature design org or a rigid system to maintain — you are defining what design at Clasp is. You'll set the direction, build the foundations, and make the high-leverage calls about brand and product identity that we don't have anyone to make today. It's also a hands-on role: at this stage, you'll design and ship the work yourself while laying the groundwork for the design function to grow around you.

You'll partner directly with the Founder & CEO and the Director of Product on the vision for the company and the product, and work closely with the Product Managers on Clasp Talent and leaders in Marketing, Partner Success, and Engineering to bring it to life.

What You’ll Do

- Define Design and Brand at Clasp: Own the visual identity, design language, and standard of taste across the company. Make the foundational decisions about how Clasp looks and feels — and set the bar everyone else builds toward.

- Own the Full Experience, Product to Marketing Site: Design across consumer acquisition flows, the marketing site, recruiter platforms, employee benefits experiences, and employer admin tooling — moving fluidly between brand-led marketing surfaces and operations-heavy fintech workflows so the whole journey feels like one product.

- Own and Evolve the Design System: Take ownership of our existing design system — maturing components, patterns, and principles so they scale with the company. Evolve what's working, and if you believe a deeper rethink is warranted, make the case for it. Either way, you own the standard everyone builds toward.

- Shape Product Direction, Not Just Execution: Bring a strong point of view to what we build and why, not only how it looks. Partner with the founder and Product on strategy, framing problems and proposing directions rather than waiting for fully specified requirements.

- Make Complex Workflows Feel Simple: Bring clarity to the genuinely hard surfaces — HRIS integration setup, flow-of-funds visibility, invoice and credit reconciliation, benefit administration. Make data-rich, compliance-sensitive interfaces feel calm, legible, and trustworthy.

- Get Close to Users: Partner with Product to run qualitative and quantitative research — usability testing, interviews, data-driven insights. Spend real time with healthcare students, recruiters, employees, and employer-administrators, and translate that contact into design decisions.

- Elevate the Craft: Raise the bar for clarity, quality, and cohesion across everything Clasp ships. Healthcare students deciding whether to commit to an employer, and employees relying on this benefit to repay their loans, are making meaningful career and financial decisions; the experience should reflect that gravity while removing every unnecessary friction.

- Infuse Delight and Personality: Introduce moments of engagement, warmth, and humanity that make the product feel trustworthy and memorable, not transactional — even (especially) on the operational surfaces.

- Leverage AI Workflows: Explore and responsibly apply emerging AI tools to accelerate research, ideation, and design production — making your process smarter, faster, and more scalable.

What You’ll Need

- Principal-Level Design Experience: 8+ years of product design experience, including time spent setting design direction — not just executing within someone else's system. You've owned the visual language, brand, or design practice for a product or company, and have the case studies to show how you did it.

- Strategic Range: You think beyond the screen. You can hold the company's goals in your head, form a point of view on what matters, and make foundational calls about brand and product identity with limited direction.

- Brand and Product Fluency: Comfort moving between brand-led marketing surfaces (a marketing site, a landing page, a campaign) and data-dense product tooling (an invoice reconciliation screen, an admin dashboard) — and bringing craft to both.

- Systems Thinking: Ability to hold a large, interconnected ecosystem in your head and design experiences that scale. You understand how a change in one persona's flow ripples across the others, and you build systems, not one-offs.

- Design System Ownership: You've owned or s

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