User Experience Designer

About Samply

Samply is how the music industry gets work done. Every month, hundreds of thousands of artists, producers, engineers, managers, and labels use it to review and collaborate on music, often long before the world hears it. Last year, Samply was used on every Grammy nominee for Record of the Year, including records by Sabrina Carpenter, Kendrick Lamar, Dijon, and Chappell Roan.

Artists like Bleachers, Paige Fish, Hudson Freeman, and Dijon use it as their own custom streaming service, going direct to their listeners.

We are a small team split across Wisconsin, Brooklyn, Boston, and Europe. Most of our team are musicians or have an outsized love for music. They have wide autonomy to talk to users and lead projects themselves.

The Opportunity

We are hiring a Product Designer to own how Samply looks and feels across every surface: the consumer iPhone app artists use to hear their own unreleased work, and the denser web surfaces where managers, labels, and studios run their day. The role is hands-on and end to end. You will take problems from framing through final pixels, work directly with leadership and engineering on what gets built, and ship in days rather than quarters.

We value aesthetics as highly as information hierarchy. Plenty of designers can make a dense dashboard legible; fewer can make it legible and beautiful. Our users are artists and the people who work with them — an audience with taste and a low tolerance for anything that looks generic. The bar is a product that feels as premium as anything else they pay for.

Responsibilities

• Own the iPhone app end to end: playback, sharing, upload, and the new surfaces around stem-splitting and audio editing.
• Hold a high aesthetic bar on simple screens, where there is nowhere to hide. Type, spacing, color, and motion all carry weight.
• Prototype interactions before they are built, so the team is reacting to something real rather than a static frame.
• Design Dense, Professional Surfaces
• Design the web surfaces where labels, managers, and studios track projects, listeners, and activity across large catalogs.
• Make dense information readable at a glance for a busy professional, without falling back on a generic dashboard template.
• Make deliberate calls about what to surface, what to summarize, and what to leave out.
• Build and maintain the design system: components, type scale, color, iconography, and the rules that keep new work consistent.
• Stay with the work through implementation. Review builds, sit with engineers, and hold the line on the details that get lost in handoff.
• Design for accessibility from the start: contrast, Dynamic Type, VoiceOver behavior, and keyboard paths on web.
• Talk to users directly. Artists, producers, managers, and label teams are reachable, and their feedback is immediate and specific.
• Partner with leadership during scoping. Push back on requirements, propose simpler paths, and flag what will not feel right before it gets built.
• Bring a point of view on brand: how Samply presents itself in the product, in the App Store, and everywhere else a user meets it.

Qualifications

• A portfolio of beautiful, shipped work, with your specific contributions clearly attributable
• 3\+ years designing digital products, including at least one surface shipped to real users at scale
• Range across both simple consumer surfaces and dense, information-heavy ones, or strong work on one side and a clear point of view on the other
• Command of visual craft: typography, layout, color, and motion, not information architecture alone
• Fluency in Figma, including components, variants, and prototyping
• A working sense of what is cheap and what is expensive to build, and the ability to talk with engineers on their terms
• Comfort in a startup environment: high ownership, evolving requirements, and the ability to pick up unfamiliar skills fast
• Based in and authorized to work in the United States