Senior Product Designer

Duration - 16 month contract as cover for a designer on leave. It’s possible this role may turn into a permanent role as our company grows over the contract period.

Location - Anywhere in Aotearoa.

About Starboard Maritime Intelligence

Starboard is web-based geospatial software that provides teams with a real-time view of global maritime activity and powerful tools for analysis and collaboration. Starboard helps nations tackle complex maritime challenges, ranging from risk-assessing arriving vessels to detecting illegal fishing and helping prevent biosecurity outbreaks.

We are a remote organisation with team members dispersed throughout Aotearoa and Australia. We are collaborative and supportive by nature and necessity—software and science are both difficult. Combining the two successfully requires teamwork, empathy and a willingness to listen and understand other people’s point of view.

We believe that to build a great company and tackle complex problems, we need a broad range of skills, perspectives and backgrounds. We invest in our team and support one another.

We have recently raised capital, are growing our recurring revenue, and are hiring engineers and an international sales team in addition to this role.

Who we’re looking for

Our product designers play a broad and pivotal role in how we design our software, how we decide what to build, what sequence to build it in, and when to ship an update or feature. Given our lean team (26 people) they also lend their design and product expertise to testing and marketing support from time to time. To enjoy and excel in this broad role we’re looking for:

• An experienced product designer with an analytical, curious and collaborative mindset that cares deeply about our customers.
• An expert in interaction design with a history of working through complex problems and designing elegant solutions, typically expressed as user flows and prototypes, not just static screens.
• Someone comfortable conducting user research with existing, and potential new customers, to shape what we build (and don’t build) and how we build it.
• Someone who sweats the details but is pragmatic.
• Someone who has collaborated closely with engineering teams to ship features, and knows the great lengths it takes to deliver excellent software that’s used and enjoyed every day by many people.

How we build software and how product designers fit in

We work backwards from the customer problem to the technology. Our roadmap comes from team ideas, user research, market research, and work required to make our software reliable, fast, and scale with user growth. It contains a mixture of large unique and valuable features, and tiny improvements. We believe great software is made of a thousand, small good experiences.

We deliver software with highly collaborative cross functional product teams. These teams include front and back end engineers, data scientists and product designers. Designers typically bounce between user research, developing new design flows and prototypes, to iterating over and over again with product teams on new releases until we’re happy to ship them. Our mature engineering practices enable constant iteration within the app, and we typically push to production multiple times a day. There is no handing designs ‘over the fence’ for teams to build them. There is no fence.

Designers collaborate closely with each other to share user research and work through ideas and solutions, either in person (in Wellington) or over calls. They are also supported by the chief product officer who is from a design leadership background.

As a company and product team we set and measure annual and quarterly goals. We don’t break down tasks into small units, we don’t plan two week sprints, and we don’t measure velocity. We give our teams and team members space and autonomy to come up with efficient ways to solve problems and deliver great software.

ping long term relationships and engagement with clients, and demonstrated ability to grow annual contract values.

Why work with us

Aside from the engaging, impactful work you’ll be doing with talented people we want to ensure you are set up adequately, to do this job remotely:

• We will help you get sorted with the equipment you need to work from home, including a laptop (Mac, Windows or Linux - your choice), desk and chair, if needed.
• We will contribute to some of the costs of working from home.
• It will be up to you where you work and how you structure your day, providing you’re able to engage with the team for meetings, discussions and problem-solving, to get the work done.
• Competitive salary.

How to apply

To apply for this role, please head to our listing on Seek.

Please note – there is no closing date for this job posting. We will be reviewing applications as they come in so it is recommended you submit your application sooner rather than later. However, we will keep looking until we find the right candidate.

If you have any questions regarding this position, please email work@starboard.nz.