Principal Product Designer
tracebloc · Hybrid · Full-time
About tracebloc
tracebloc is a federated learning workspace. Users train, fine-tune, and benchmark ML models on private data that never leaves their infrastructure (hospitals, banks, factories). We orchestrate training across distributed runs the contributor never sees, average model weights across them, and return a single working model.
Our users are ML engineers and data scientists. The product is technically dense and the UX is the moat.
The role
You'll be the first dedicated product designer at tracebloc. The whole experience is yours: from how a contributor links their dataset, to how a researcher reads a benchmark, to how a model gets queued, trained, averaged, and shipped.
Today the product works. It's also fragmented. Different surfaces were built at different times by engineers without a design partner. Your year-one mandate is to make tracebloc feel like one product.
You report directly to Lukas (founder, CEO) and work with the engineering team. No design team to hand off to. No design manager above you.
What you'll own
* Research with ML engineers and customers (mostly remote, occasional travel)
* Information architecture across the workspace, the SDK docs experience, and the contributor flow
* Prototyping (Figma is fine, code is better)
* Visual and interaction design across web and the SDK touch points
* The design system, until we hire your second designer
* Hiring the next designer when the time comes
You
* 5 to 9 years shipping product design at technical products. Dev tools, ML platforms, data infrastructure. Your users were engineers, not consumers.
* Strong systems thinker. You can hold the whole product in your head and decide what shipping order makes sense.
* Comfortable building from research, not just polishing handed-down briefs.
* Tight visual craft. We're not asking you to be a brand designer, but every screen ships under your hand.
* You'd rather have a 30-minute call with a customer than a 30-minute design review.
Bonus
* Prior founding-designer or principal experience at an early-stage technical product
* Worked on ML, federated learning, or privacy-preserving ML
* Comfortable shipping in code (React, Tailwind, Next.js)
* Published writing or talks on technical product design
How to apply
Email carrer@tracebloc.io with:
1. Portfolio or LinkedIn
2. One shipped project where the user was technical. One paragraph on the hardest UX decision you made on it
3. Earliest possible start
* I read every email myself. Expect a reply within 5 days.