Product Design Director, Buyer

Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. We’re re-defining e-commerce by blending community, shopping, and entertainment into a community just for you. As a remote co-located team, we’re inspired by innovation and anchored in our values. With hubs in the US, UK, Germany, Ireland, and Poland, we’re building the future of online marketplaces –together.

From fashion, beauty, and electronics to collectibles like trading cards, comic books, and even live plants, our live auctions have something for everyone.

And we’re just getting started! As one of the fastest growing marketplaces, we’re looking for bold, forward-thinking problem solvers across all functional areas. Check out the latest Whatnot updates on our news and engineering blogs and join us as we enable anyone to turn their passion into a business, and bring people together through commerce.

💻 Role

We’re looking for a strategic and inspiring Director of Product Design to lead our Buyer Design team—the group responsible for shaping the end-to-end experience for millions of users navigating our marketplace.

As the design leader overseeing the entire buyer journey, you'll drive the strategy and execution for everything from customer acquisition, activation, to retention and re-engagement. This includes discovery surfaces (browse, search, ranking, personalization, taxonomy), the live shopping experience, and customer service flows.

You’ll partner closely with Product, Engineering, Data Science, Marketing, and our Executive Team to ensure we're not just meeting user expectations, but creating joyful, seamless, and high-performing experiences that define the future of live commerce.

As a player-coach, you’ll balance leading, mentoring, and rolling up your sleeves to design impactful experiences. You’ll help elevate the team’s craft, drive design strategy, and collaborate cross-functionally with product, engineering, research, and business teams to deliver innovative solutions that make finding what you love seamless, intuitive, and delightful.

• Lead and scale a high-performing team of product designers across the buyer funnel.

• Define and drive the vision, strategy, and execution for the buyer experience in collaboration with cross-functional partners.

• Partner with research, data, and product to develop deep customer empathy and inform high-impact design decisions.

• Shape intuitive, elegant systems across discovery, live shopping, and post-purchase experiences.

• Ensure our experiences are accessible, inclusive, and delightfully human.

• Champion design quality and consistency across surfaces while enabling speed and iteration.

• Nurture a strong design culture through mentorship, feedback, and high standards for craft and thinking.

• Represent design in executive conversations and influence company-wide priorities.

Team members in this role are required to be within commuting distance of our New York, NY, San Francisco, CA, Seattle, WA, or Los Angeles, CA hubs.

Curious about who thrives at Whatnot? We’ve found that embodying a low ego, growth mindset, and high-impact drive goes a long way here.

As our next Product Design Director, you should have 10+ years of product design experience, with at least 3 years leading teams, plus:

• A player-coach mindset—excited to mentor, but equally passionate about designing and solving problems hands-on.

• Strong portfolio showcasing interaction and visual design skills, with a track record of shipping successful products.

• Proven success designing and scaling customer-facing experiences across a complex funnel (acquisition through retention).

• Deep expertise in interaction design, systems thinking, and user-centered design.

• Strong understanding of search, discovery, personalization, and taxonomy design principles.

• Experience in e-commerce, marketplaces, or live shopping platforms is a major plus.

• A strong collaborator who thrives at the intersection of product, business, and user needs.

• A portfolio that demonstrates thoughtful, elegant solutions to complex problems.

• Flexible Time off Policy and Company-wide Holidays (including a spring and winter break)

• Health Insurance options including Medical, Dental, Vision

• Work From Home Support

  • Home office setup allowance

  • Monthly allowance for cell phone and internet

• Care benefits

  • Monthly allowance for wellness

  • Annual allowance towards Childcare

  • Lifetime benefit for family planning, such as adoption or fertility expenses

• Retirement; 401k offering for Traditional and Roth accounts in the US (employer match up to 4% of base salary) and Pension plans internationally

• Monthly allowance to dogfood the app

  • All Whatnauts are expected to develop a deep understanding of our product. We're passionate about building the best user experience, and all employees are expected to use Whatnot as both a buyer and a seller as part of their job (our dogfooding budget makes this fun and easy!).

• Parental Leave

  • 16 weeks of paid parental leave + one month gradual return to work *company leave allowances run concurrently with country leave requirements which take precedence.

Whatnot is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, parental status, disability status, or any other status protected by local law. We believe that our work is better and our company culture is improved when we encourage, support, and respect the different skills and experiences represented within our workforce.