Overview

Wirecutter, the product review and buying guide arm of The New York Times Company, is seeking an experienced product designer to explore and help define its expansion into Personal Finance.

As a product designer focused on Personal Finance, you will be tasked with researching and designing key features for Wirecutter’s personal finance strategy. You’ll work with a tightly knit team of editors, product thinkers, and developers to identify reader problems, define the user experience of getting financial guidance, and integrate the work into the sitewide design of Wirecutter.com.

A successful designer in this role will be relentlessly reader-focused, with a mind for the complexities of personal finance and an eye for simplifying them for everyday people. You’re motivated, self-directed, and able to own the design of a project from posing hypotheses to crafting pixel-perfect designs.

This position may be remote, or based in Wirecutter’s NYC or LA offices.

Who are we?

Wirecutter is a list of the best products for people who don’t want to take a lot of time figuring out what to get. It was founded in September 2011, and it became a part of The New York Times Company in October 2016.

The company’s purpose: to help people find great things, quickly and easily. Through rigorous testing, research, reporting, and whatever means necessary, they create straightforward recommendations that save readers from unnecessary stress, time, and effort. We then monetize these reviews through enabling our readers to easily purchase the products they are interested in.

The New York Times Company is making a sizable investment to accelerate growth of the business. Wirecutter aims to expand this business by improving performance of existing product categories while applying Wirecutter product review approach to new product categories, in addition to exploring new revenue opportunities in commerce.

Why should you apply?

As the product designer for Wirecutter’s personal finance coverage, you’ll play a key role in building an important venture for the company from the ground up. You’ll have the ability to not only shape but also execute on the vertical’s strategy and help represent the team in product and design meetings.

The opportunity is highly entrepreneurial, but with the financial backing of The New York Times Company, which is betting we can turn Wirecutter into a substantial part of the company’s future revenue. As a product designer at Wirecutter, you’ll have tight-knit, daily collaboration with your team on personal finance, while also enjoying the camaraderie of Wirecutter’s product design team and the resources of the larger design community at The New York Times.

Responsibilities

  • Designs user experiences and interfaces for Wirecutter’s personal finance vertical
  • Defines and proposes solutions to complex problems
  • Assists with and synthesizes information from stakeholder interviews, analytics, and usability testing
  • Creates sketches and/or prototypes to visualize and communicate solutions
  • Creates production-ready design deliverables
  • Provides feedback and thoughtful critique to other designers
  • Works collaboratively with peers and cross-functional team members

Qualifications

  • Enthusiasm for The New York Times’s and Wirecutter’s mission
  • 3+ years of design experience, preferably working on a product, or another environment blending UX and business decisions
  • Able to provide samples of work that show complex and creative UX solutions, extraordinary visual design and solid information architecture
  • Strong visual and typographic sensibility
  • Deep understanding for how qualitative research and data inform product and design decisions
  • A great listener who loves giving and receiving honest, thoughtful feedback
  • Steadfast in defense of both the user experience and the editorial brand while also contributing to solutions that drive the business forward
  • Able to communicate design effectively, regardless of the audience
  • Enjoy working on a cross-discipline team alongside editors, engineers, product managers, and other designers
  • Enjoy shipping small, quick experiments to explore or validate your ideas
  • Understanding of HTML and CSS techniques

Culture and benefits at The New York Times Company and Wirecutter:

Though Wirecutter has physical locations in both NYC and LA, the company promotes and encourages a remote workforce, so that our employees can work in flexible and comfortable ways.

We are committed to career development, supported by a formal mentoring program as well as tuition reimbursement.  The New York Times Company offers frequent panel discussions and talks by industry leaders (Sheryl Sandberg, Melinda Gates and Ta-Nehisi Coates are a few recent examples), that we encourage our employees to attend.

We believe diversity fuels innovation and creativity, and we have a variety of employee groups and task forces across The New York Times Company and Wirecutter dedicated to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace.

We offer a generous parental leave policy, which was recently expanded in response to employee feedback.  Birth mothers receive 16 weeks fully paid, adoptive parents and birth fathers receive 10 weeks also fully paid.  Similarly, we offer competitive health and dental insurance, as well as 401k matching.

About The Wirecutter

The Wirecutter, and its associated sites, are about helping people find the best gear to buy using dozens of hours of research of all available sources and our own testing.

What’s different in how we do things is our directness in recommending people exactly what we would buy ourselves or recommend to our loved ones--we don’t ask people who are looking for our advice to click through multiple pages of reviews or meaningless industry news to exploit them for advertising inventory. We just give them our recommendation in a single page, and the evidence of why that is and why they should believe us, and let them them get on with their lives. It's that simple.

You may be aware that we run our company in service of our readers. Less known is our commitment to the people with which we work. We ask everyone who works here to be effective, to be efficient, and to move the needle every day.

In exchange, we offer you the ability to work from wherever on your own hours for competitive pay at a reasonable pace. We love working with people who can get it done in a world-class way and can communicate well with a team, and who know how to enjoy a balanced life outside of work.

Salary and perks: Although we are a small, bootstrapped company, we pride ourselves in offering competitive compensation including, but not limited to, healthcare coverage, PTO, and a flexible work schedule. We want to make sure every employee is happy and has the tools, resources, and knowledge to grow with the company.