? Why are we opening this position?

GitBook is a modern documentation platform. Our ambition is to empower teams' intelligence. We want to help teams work more efficiently by creating a single place to leverage their knowledge and share their docs with the world.

We're looking for a detail-oriented UI designer who is code-capable to share ownership of the visual side of our product. This role will be positioned to collaborate seamlessly with a design-led product process and a product-focused engineering team.

Note: We're specifically looking for a designer who is comfortable reading and writing HTML and CSS to a point where you can contribute directly to coded components. The whole 'should designers code?' conversation is exhausting, but in this case, we have a clear need for this kind of role.

? What will you be doing?

Part of our Product & Engineering team, as a Product Designer your daily mission will include:

Taking ownership of the visual language of the GitBook product and delivering consistently high-quality interface screens and components

Shared ownership of our Design System (with product) and UI component library (with engineering)

Collaborating with Product to take early stage explorations through to high-quality prototypes

Collaborating with engineers to nail the specifics of production prototypes and coded components

You'll be valued for:

Being heavily detail-focused: You understand that the finer details and aesthetics can have a profound impact on the enjoyment of a product and take pride in sweating the details. Detail-focused also applies to your process, and you're able to produce work that covers multiple bases – your buttons have hover and active states, interactions are documented, edge-cases are considered, and you can bring clarity to a development process.

Being code-capable: A substantial part of this role will involve making contributions to our coded UI component library to ensure that our final interface components meet these high visual standards. We're not looking for a full-stack JS developer/amazing designer unicorn or anything silly, but basic HTML knowledge and strong CSS skills to express your design ideas in their final form would be great.

Being product-focused and collaborative: You're used to designing interfaces for modern products and are at least familiar with 'typical' product <> design <> engineering collaboration processes. No need to be an Agile guru or anything, but exceptional communication of design decisions and a desire to dive deep into product/user research is a big plus.

Being Design Systems-focused: A huge part of crafting consistently great work comes from standardising, documenting and centralising our core design principles, components, interaction patternsand assets. Your experience working with Design Systems either as contributor or maintainer will be highly valued.

Empathy and ethics: You care about people and want to understand the problems they face. You understand that there are ethical considerations in design around things like attention, cognition, accessibility and cultural implication. You have a strong desire to do right by people and to help foster a diverse and humanist approach to design and research, and are willing to push back on ideas based on your understanding of our research and your own lived experiences.

Having a strong portfolio: Your portfolio is full of examples of great work that shows all the above skills manifested as well-crafted products and interfaces.

~4+ years experience in a product-focused design role: Some proven experience delivering interfaces and components in a product-focused role is a requirement. Years on the job is not a hard-and-fast metric, so if you're less experienced but still think you'd do a great job, don't be discouraged by this. At the same time, if you're way more experienced than this, don't think this is a 'midweight' role that you're 'too senior' for – your character, craft and output are far more important to us and we want to create space for people to make good impact.

A note on skills and experience: We understand that not everyone has the same path through this industry, and that designers in particular tend to come from all kinds of backgrounds and paths through this industry. If you don't fit all of these values, please don't let that stop you from applying!

We want to welcome and include folks from all walks of life, and it'd be silly if we self-selected out of great people applying by asking for rigid experience or education requirements.

We're looking to enable this role by:

Prioritising around quality: We don't want to rush releases, and we're more than happy to take extra time to focus on the quality and the intangibles around creating a fluid and finalised product experience. We're not launching MVPs, running design sprints, or trying to find early market traction; we're building a mature, modern product in a space full of well-designed competitors.

A design-led product process: Our product process at GitBook leans heavily on many of the practices from things like Human-Centred Design and modern UX workshopping. You won't just be getting handed wireframes to run with, and will be involved in product exploration, user testing and research efforts.

An open and compassionate feedback process: At GitBook, we give a shit about the people we work with, and we're constantly looking to improve our feedback processes to be open, clear, and actionable, but to also be compassionate and considerate of our work and our craft. Everyone has their preferred way of working and communicating, and we look to accommodate that wherever possible.

What's next ?

First, you need to send us your application that speaks directly to this role.The objective is for us to picture how you envision the impact this role might have on your future and the impact your might have on GitBook's future. You may want to address some of the work we do, how it reflect to your past experiences, etc. It's up to you there's no right or wrong answer and we're eager to learn about your expectations and ambitions. At this stage we'd also love to have a look at your portfolio!

As the next step, we will arrange a discovery call so that both of you are able to ensure there is a correlation between GitBook's expectations, the role and your own expectations.

Afterwards, you will be meeting with members of the product and design team to go more in-depth into the role, geek out over design shit, and get a good grasp of the finer details around work and process.

After that, you'll be invited to present a project that you're really proud of to tell us the story behind your work and give us an insight into a real-life project that you think shows your work, process, and attitude in the best light. This is instead of a take-home 'test' that you might have seen in other interview processes.

Finally, you will have the opportunity to meet with the team to have a preview of GitBook's culture and daily life but also to learn more about GitBook's history, our vision and ambition, and ensuring you're also happy with our culture and core values.

Our discussion starts right here, we're looking forward to hearing from you.

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