Product Designer (Contract)

B2B Product Designer

Poka Labs · Remote · Part-time, approximately 10–15 hours per week

Poka Labs builds AI agents for chemical and industrial manufacturers. We help commercial teams turn customer requests into quotes, find the right products in large catalogs, and make better pricing decisions.

We’re a YC Summer 2024 company with a small engineering team and a growing product. We’re looking for an experienced contract product designer who can take a complicated workflow, ask the right questions, and turn it into something intuitive that our engineers can build.

We expect an initial engagement of one to two months, with the potential to continue or expand.

The work

Our customers work with tens of thousands of products, complex pricing, and multiple layers of review. We need to make that complexity manageable.

You’ll work directly with our technical co-founder, Andrew, to design new features and improve important workflows across our quoting and pricing products. Examples include:

• Helping users review AI-recommended price changes across a large product catalog without becoming overwhelmed.
• Making quote status, review requests, and next steps easy to understand.
• Showing the reasoning behind AI recommendations at the right level of detail.
• Incorporating customer feedback while supporting both simple and more complex workflows.

The immediate priority is getting new features and core interactions right. Targeted improvements to the existing product will also be part of the work.

What you’ll own

• Build enough understanding of our product and customers to make decisions in context.
• Turn requirements, customer feedback, and conversations into clear user flows and concrete designs.
• Identify missing requirements, edge cases, and tradeoffs before engineering starts building.
• Produce implementation-ready screens, prototypes, and concise interaction notes.
• Work with engineers through implementation and refine designs based on feedback.
• Establish reusable patterns where they help us build more consistently.

We want to be able to explain what a feature needs to accomplish and trust you to lead the design work, without requiring a founder to direct every screen.

Who we’re looking for

You’re an experienced product designer with strong UX judgment and a track record of making complex software easier to use.

You likely have:

• Experience designing B2B software with substantial workflows, tables, approvals, or other information-heavy interfaces.
• The ability to reason through an ambiguous product problem and explain your decisions.
• Good instincts for hierarchy, progressive disclosure, and helping users understand what to do next.
• A practical approach to working with a small engineering team: you know where detail matters and when a straightforward solution is enough.
• The independence to get up to speed, ask focused questions, and move work forward.
• Comfort using AI tools to explore ideas and accelerate delivery while applying your own design judgment.

Experience with AI products or early-stage startups is helpful. Chemical industry experience isn’t required.

How we’ll work together

This is a hands-on design role with direct access to the founders and engineers. We expect a weekly design touchpoint, with most collaboration happening asynchronously.

We prefer a monthly retainer based on an agreed scope and expected capacity. The starting commitment is approximately 10–15 hours per week, with scope and compensation agreed together. From there we can be more flexible!

Interview Process

1. Send samples of work and blurb of what you’ve worked on in applicatiom
2. Call to discuss
3. Short async design task
4. Reference call(s)
5. Offer