Candle
Candle helps friends and couples grow closer daily in just 5 minutes.
Core Product Designer
About the role
What You’ll Do
Own core surfaces.
Design and evolve the heart of the Candle experience. This includes the daily challenges, streaks, games, onboarding, discovery, notifications, and more.
Think in systems.
Craft emotional loops, streak mechanics, reward systems, and connection rituals that drive daily engagement.
Ship end-to-end.
From concept → prototype → polished UI → shipped feature. You’ll work directly with founders and engineers to bring ideas live fast.
Invent new formats, design to market
Design new interaction patterns for connection and marketing: collaborative canvases, async voice, micro-games, emotional check-ins, rituals, etc.
Obsess over details.
Typography, motion, haptics, micro-interactions, empty states, streak animations, the small things matter here a lot. Every pixel is questioned.
What We’re Looking For
- 2+ years designing and shipping consumer mobile products
- A portfolio that shows taste, restraint, and strong interaction thinking
- Deep understanding of mobile UX patterns and emotional design
- Strong Figma skills (components, systems, prototyping)
- Ability to prototype interactive flows (bonus: React Native, SwiftUI, Framer, ProtoPie, etc.)
- High product intuition, you can think like a PM when needed
- You care about user psychology
Bonus if:
- You’ve worked on social, gaming, or habit-forming products
- You’ve built and shipped your own app
- Have done animations with Rive
Why This Is Different
- You’ll work directly with founders and exited founders (Apple, Twitter, NASA engineers, Forbes 30u30 )
- Your work will be seen by hundreds of thousands within days
- We ship fast, experiments go live weekly
- We care deeply about emotional impact, not vanity metrics
- You’ll help define the design language of a generational consumer brand
If you want to design something people use every single day with someone they love, this is that opportunity.
About the interview
- 30 min intro call with founders
- 1 hour portfolio deep dive
- Design exercise (focused on product thinking)
- Final round, strategy + collaboration
About Candle
Candle’s mission is to end loneliness.
We are a daily game designed to help close friends and couples stay emotionally connected. Each day, you and someone you care about unlock a shared random challenge. It could be a thoughtful question, a funny debate, a photo or drawing prompt, a mini-game, even a local date idea or activity.
One shared moment a day to laugh, reflect, and grow together.
We envision a world where everyone is paired with the ~8–9 people who matter most in their lives.
In under 10 months, with a full-time team of just three, we're now at:
- 800,000+ users
- $2M+ in annualized revenue
- <8% monthly churn
