[Hiring] Senior Product Designer @Pawlicy Advisor

Role Description

Every day, pet owners walk out of a vet's office having just said no to a treatment their pet needed, not because they didn't care, but because they couldn't afford it. Pawlicy Advisor exists to eliminate this problem. Pawlicy Advisor is a profitable venture-backed startup building the infrastructure that connects pet owners to the right financial protection for their pets, starting with the most trusted pet insurance marketplace in the US, distributed through thousands of veterinary practices nationwide. The company has delivered over 1 million unique quotes, has raised $19M+, has found product-market fit, and is now scaling.

Pawlicy Advisor is hiring a Senior Product Designer to own design end to end: research, wireframes, high-fidelity mockups, and the design system. You will own the design of the marketplace experience that helps pet parents make one of the most important decisions they face, working 1-2 sprints ahead of a fast-moving engineering team that loves to build high quality front end experiences. This is a high-ownership role reporting directly to the Chief Product Officer, on an outstanding team of five engineers, a data analyst, a senior product manager, and an engineering manager.

What You Own

• Design Execution:
  • Wireframes, high-fidelity mockups, and design iteration for new features and experiments across the website.
  • Gathering feedback from internal stakeholders on new product features and resolving conflicting input.
  • Building and managing the design system in close collaboration with the senior marketing designer.
  • Design QA for engineering: reviewing shipped work against designs before release.
• Content Ownership:
  • First drafts of UX copy in product: quote flow language, plan explanations, error states, and making insurance terms understandable for pet parents.
  • Ensuring copy reviews are completed by legal and compliance.
  • Supporting Pawlicy's brand development across product, site, and marketing assets.
• User Research:
  • Deep competitive analysis of the pet insurance landscape and other marketplaces, feeding insights into the roadmap.
  • User testing for new product and feature development: talking to pet parents and veterinary staff, analyzing behavior, and translating findings into product ideas and design decisions.

Where You Partner

• Engineering: handoff and design QA with a team that loves building high quality front end experiences, working 1-2 sprints ahead of them.
• Product: user research and competitive analysis with the senior product manager.
• Marketing design: the design system and brand development in close collaboration with the senior marketing designer.
• Legal and compliance: copy reviews on insurance language, keeping it plain without losing accuracy.

What Success Looks Like

• First 90 days:
  • Designing 1-2 sprints ahead of engineering with a queue you defined yourself; nobody assigns the work.
  • Design QA is running: shipped work is reviewed against designs before release.
  • Command of the competitive landscape: pet insurance and marketplace patterns feeding the roadmap.
  • First user tests with pet parents run, synthesized, and reflected in shipped designs.
• First 12 months:
  • The design system is adopted by engineering, and accelerating feature velocity.
  • Quote flow and plan language is measurably clearer, with insurance terms pet parents understand.
  • Product changes have increased quote to sale conversion at a statistically significant level.
  • Research findings routinely change what gets built.
  • Craft holds at a high bar with no design reviewer above you.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of product design experience with a track record of significant ownership, ideally at an early stage startup or fast-paced environment.
• A strong portfolio demonstrating end-to-end design thinking, from research and strategy through polished, shipped UI.
• Experience owning or significantly contributing to a design system.
• Strong UX writing skills: you can draft clear, plain-language product copy.
• Proven experience running user research and competitive analysis independently and translating findings into product decisions.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate across functions: you have worked closely with engineers, marketers, and business stakeholders.
• Legally authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship.
• Preferred: experience in insurtech, fintech, or consumer marketplaces. Extra points if you love animals and believe pet healthcare is a serious, underserved problem.

How You Work

• You do your best work with real autonomy and define your own work 1-2 sprints ahead of engineering, with no design director above you.
• You initiate projects yourself, from spotting the problem to shipping.
• You hold strong opinions, loosely held: a clear point of view on how to solve user problems without being precious about it.
• You push back, disagree, and align without it becoming political.
• You thrive in a high pace environment and love owning your craft.
• You use AI tools daily to compound the company’s output.

AI and the Hiring Process

We embrace AI at Pawlicy and our work still relies on what the humans bring to it. So please leave the AI out of interviews and case studies. Prep with it all you like, but in the room, we want your thinking, your questions, your judgment. These stages exist so we can get to know you and how you'd work with our team. We're hiring you, not a model and it is you we want to see.

To be concrete: no AI assistants or chatbots on any device during interviews, and nobody else feeding you answers. Spell-check, autocomplete and notes you wrote yourself are all completely fine. If it turns out AI was used where we've asked you not to, it may end your candidacy.

If any part of our process is a barrier because of how you read, write or communicate, email [email protected] before that stage and we'll talk through the options. The skills we're assessing stay the same; what changes is the format. Asking has no bearing on how we assess you.

Benefits

• Base salary range: $165,000 - $200,000.
• Startup equity grant.
• Top-tier medical, dental, and vision insurance; 401(k) employer contributions; flexible vacation.
• Remote-first within the United States.

Career Path

This role is the only product designer seat at a company of ~20 today, growing to 25-30 in 2027, reporting directly to the Chief Product Officer, with a path to design leadership as the team scales. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in NYC, Pawlicy Advisor is a licensed insurance agency and the leading pet insurance marketplace in the US.

If you do your best work with real autonomy, thrive in a high pace environment, and love owning your craft, Pawlicy would like to talk. Learn more at https://www.pawlicy.com/about-us/