The posting
About NewsBreak
Local life runs on local information. What happened down the street? Who can fix this? Where should we go tonight? NewsBreak started in 2015 to answer these questions, and today more than 40 million people a month rely on us to follow what’s going on in their zip code.
Three platforms with one vision: powering local life. Led by founder and CEO Jeff Zheng, NewsBreak is our local life and news platform; Nearby AI connects people with local businesses; and NDot AI helps publishers and creators grow and earn.
Building for the long term. A $115 million Series C made us a unicorn in 2021, and we keep investing in our people. We’re Great Place to Work® certified and named to Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators (2025) and Fortune’s Best Workplaces in the Bay Area™ (2026).
Everyone makes an impact. Whether you write code, shape products, tell our story, or run the business, we want people who own projects end to end, stay curious, and speak up. Join us.
Learn more at: NewsBreak, Nearby AI, NDot AI
About Nearby AI
Nearby AI is a new company from NewsBreak building a trust-first marketplace for local home services. We help homeowners understand a problem, what it should reasonably cost, and whether to hire at all before they are connected to a provider, and we help service providers win work on fit and outcomes rather than on speed of contact.
Our mission: give people clarity and control from the first sign of a problem to a job done right, and give good contractors work they are equipped to win.
We are a small founding team. We work from evidence, keep a written record of decisions, and hold a short set of product principles we do not trade for revenue: no pay-for-rank, no sharing of customer contact information beyond what the customer approved, and no quality claims we cannot substantiate.
The problem you will own
Our product asks people to make a high-stakes household decision with confidence, then to control who may contact them. The same experience has to work as a guided flow and as a conversational one, serve a broad consumer audience with widely varying digital confidence, and remain clear when it is shared with a family member who is helping from a distance. On the other side of the marketplace, service professionals need an experience that makes the economics and the expectations legible before they commit. You will be the first designer and will set the standard for all of it.
Responsibilities
- Own product design end to end for the consumer and professional experiences: research, information architecture, interaction design, visual design, and the copy that carries them.
- Establish and maintain the design system so that multiple front ends stay one coherent product, and so engineering can move quickly without design debt.
- Design the decision, consent, and verification-disclosure patterns that are central to the product, and make trust legible without relying on badges or claims.
- Set the accessibility and inclusive-design standard for the company and hold every release to it.
- Run continuous discovery and usability research with real users, and turn findings into shipped changes on short cycles.
- Partner closely with product, engineering, and the AI team so that model behavior and interface behavior are designed together.
- Over time, shape the design function: hire, mentor, or remain a senior individual contributor with others around you.
Qualifications
Required
- 6+ years of product design experience for Senior; 9+ years, including time at a staff or lead level, for Staff.
- Multiple consumer products shipped end to end, from research through launch, where you were the primary designer.
- A portfolio that shows a consistent, repeatable framework for how you approach problems, with outcomes stated. We will ask you to walk us through the framework, not only the screens.
- Ownership of a design system used by multiple engineers or teams.
- Fluency with AI-assisted design and prototyping tools as a daily production method, while retaining ownership of the judgment.
- Hands-on user research and usability testing that you planned and ran yourself, recently.
- Experience designing conversion-critical flows such as onboarding, forms, or transactions where user error carries real cost, with measured results.
- Strong writing. Interface copy is part of the design, and plain language is a requirement.
Preferred
- Utility or tool products where the value lies in getting the user to a correct answer efficiently.
- High-stakes consumer flows in regulated or trust-sensitive domains such as financial services, insurance, healthcare, or public services.
- Two-sided marketplaces or products with both a consumer and a professional side.
- Shipped work that met a recognized accessibility standard and was tested with users of varying ability.
- Experience as the first or only designer at a company.
The US base salary range for this full-time position is listed below. Pay may vary based on a number of factors including job-related skills, level, experience, geographic location and relevant education or training. At NewsBreak, we design our overall rewards package to attract top talents. Depending on the position, the role may also be eligible for discretionary bonus and options. Your recruiter can share more details during the hiring process.
Annual Base Pay Range
$118,000—$250,000 USD
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