Role Overview

Come dream with us

Gather is a small team right now, which means every individual has an extremely significant role in shaping and executing the company's vision. 

Questions we find ourselves asking:

• How do we leverage virtual worlds to enable repeated, meaningful, natural connections vs. the transactional feeling of traditional video conferencing solutions?
• How can we help people feel a deep sense of presence with their teammates?
• How can we simulate the creative energy of whiteboarding with teammates? 
• How can we empower users to customize their experience so they feel a sense of pride in their space?
• … and more!

What You’ll Do

In this role, you’ll work directly as a Design Engineer for the Chief Product Officer. 

You’ll be a crucial part of our growing team to help us bring bold and creative ideas to life. With a product and canvas as rich and complex as Gather, we are biased toward prototyping and getting into code as quickly as possible to get an actual feel for our ideas. You’ll be at the center of this design-driven process, where you will drive and deliver some of our most important R&D and production features. Here’s what you’ll do:

• Partner with designers and artists to bring novel concepts to life with working prototypes and demos with a strong bias for speed and learning. 
• Partner with product engineering to ship features to production with extreme quality.
• Help drive Gather's technical roadmap, particularly with an eye on design systems, frontend performance, and overall usability. 
• Operate as a technical resource for the design team throughout the product life cycle.
• Create and manage schedules and deliverables for complex projects.
• Continuously polish and iterate on the existing user experience to make it more useful and delightful.
• Lead and participate in prospect and customer interviews.

Who You Are

• Frontend or product engineers who moonlight as designers or designers who moonlight as engineers are in our sweet spot. You'll be a good fit if you’ve played this role for 5 years at a company that delivers high-quality products. 
• Strong experience with Typescript/React architecture and development and HTML, CSS, and JS animations.
• You are particularly strong at interaction design and prototyping. 
• You have experience designing mobile and web consumer products at scale. Serious bonus points if you have worked in gaming and/or can demonstrate your passion for game design.
• You can work on ambiguous, broad problems/opportunities and smaller, well-defined projects.
• You are a critical participant in design reviews—delivering feedback to teammates to strengthen their work and soliciting feedback at every step of the process. 
• You have exceptional verbal and written communication skills for technical and non-technical partners, internally and externally.
• You are comfortable in ambiguous situations and dynamic environments and understand what fast-growing startups entail for designers.
• You are scrappy, biased toward action, and love moving fast.
• You enjoy spending time with customers and are adept at identifying the root problems that our product is uniquely positioned to solve.
• You know how to build strong relationships cross-functionally.