Product Designer

Company Description

Unusual Whales is a financial data company with a focus on US markets & options. We process around 5-10 million option trades each day (depending on volatility), 67 million stock trades and have customers from retail investors to hedge funds and leading media companies. We are a small team with employees from all over the world and are remote first (we do not have an office). We don't have regular weekly meetings and just focus on the one thing we love: Code & building cool software.

Role Description

Our web and mobile apps are the front door for most of our customers, and right now it's harder to use than it should be. Most design today is done by committee across engineering, founders and product, with a sprinkling of AI-assisted output. We're hiring our first dedicated product designer to change that.

You'll own end-to-end product design (research, IA, interaction, and visual). You'll partner closely with engineering and product on what to fix first and how to ship incrementally.

A note on the product: we're a financial data company built around options flow and related market structure data. Our power users are experienced traders, and so are several of our engineers. The strongest candidate brings real options literacy - you don't need to be a quant, but if terms like gamma exposure, IV crush, or zero-DTE flow are completely foreign to you, you'll struggle to design for our users or hold your own in design debates.

What you'll do

• Own end-to-end product design for the web app - flows, IA, interaction, visual
• Partner with engineering on what to fix first, and how to ship in increments instead of a redesign-from-scratch
• Establish lightweight design conventions (a system without the overhead of a full design system on day one)
• Run small user research efforts as needed (interviews, usability checks); product will share this load with you
• Prototype when it accelerates engineering decisions
• Push back constructively on UI patterns that don't serve the user

What you bring

• 3-6 years of product design experience shipping web products
• Portfolio of data-dense interfaces (dashboards, financial tools, analytics products, or similar)
• Real fluency in options trading or a closely related financial domain with the willingness to ramp on options fast
• Strong visual, interaction, and IA chops; you can take a flow from idea to engineering-ready spec without a handoff to another designer
• Comfortable working with engineers as peers, including when respectfully challenging their design instincts
• Self-directed; you can prioritize and structure your own work in an early-stage environment
• Crisp written communication - most of our collaboration is async

Nice to have

• Personal experience trading options or other derivatives
• Prior experience at a financial data vendor, brokerage, or trading platform
• Experience designing native mobile (iOS/Android)
• Experience helping engineering teams adopt design practices for the first time

Compensation & Benefits

• Base: $130-160K + meaningful early-hire equity
• Full health / dental / vision; 401(k) where applicable
• Remote (US); home office stipend
• Equipment of your choice

How to Apply

Email resume to jobs@unusualwhales.com

Include a portfolio link. We're especially interested in case studies that show:

1. A data-dense interface you designed and shipped (financial or otherwise)
2. How you partnered with engineering - bonus points if the engineers weren't used to working with designers
3. Any work where domain literacy meaningfully shaped your design decisions