Front-End Designer (Product)

At Planning Center, we build powerful web and mobile applications for churches. Each of our eight products has a dedicated team of designers and developers committed to refining and expanding that product in response to real customer needs. Our customers include many of the largest churches in the country, as well as tens of thousands of small community churches—we strive to make day-to-day operations easier for all of them.

About the Work

We’re seeking a front-end designer with expertise in modern web technologies to support our team in improving our software. The ideal candidate will be well-versed in front-end technologies but also have a strong design sense. While your day-to-day may not typically consist of creating high-fidelity mockups, you would be expected to understand basic visual design principles that help communicate complex concepts in the Planning Center ecosystem.

The Front End Designer reports to the Product Design Manager and is embedded on a multidisciplinary product team. In this role, you can expect to:

• Collaborate with your Product Manager to shape feature pitches and create wireframes to visualize user flows
• Advocate for our customers by creating and building UI that is simple and visually aligned with our other products
• Communicate design decisions (how we got there and why) to other members of the product team(s)
• Pairing with your designer and developer teammates
• Reviewing your teammates’ pull requests to increase the quality of what we build and learn from one another
• Deploying to production with one click (we’re very comfortable with deploying several times a day)

Who We Look For

The best fits for any role on the Planning Center team are people embodying our Core Values:

• Engage with Humility - We actively participate with openness and receptiveness. We are ready to listen, learn, and speak thoughtfully and kindly—regardless of skill level, expertise, or place on the org chart.
• Invest in our team - We give our time and energy to our team’s success—improving collaboration with effective communication, making space for diverse perspectives, sharing knowledge, and asking questions.
• Do Our Best Work - We aspire to do our best possible work—continually looking for ways to improve the quality of our individual output and contribute to our team's overall success and growth.
• Focus on Customer Impact - We advocate for our customer’s best interests in our decision-making—we can trace the goal of every project back to creating positive value for our customers.
• Think Holistically, Work Iteratively - We focus on taking practical steps towards our goals with an awareness of the broader context—thinking big, working small.

We believe the strongest teams comprise people with diverse backgrounds and experiences, and we are committed to cultivating that diversity here at Planning Center. We're building an inclusive, supportive place for you to do your best work.

The Hiring Process

During the hiring process, you’ll have a chance to interact with several team members. We strongly encourage you to bring any questions to anybody you interact with. You’re interviewing us as much as we’re interviewing you.

The teammates you’ll encounter along the way:

• Our Recruiting and Growth Strategist
• Several designers from the Product Design Team
• The Product Design Manager you'll report to
  

Applications will be accepted until 9AM PST on December 4th, 2023. We aim to have a final decision made by 3PM PST on December 19th, 2023. Our offices will be closed from December 22nd until January 2, 2024, so a start date will land on January 15th, 2024 .

Below is an outline of the steps in our hiring process.

• Step one: Apply with a resume, cover letter, and previous work samples (Portfolio, Github, etc.) Your cover letter should speak directly to your interest in this position. We want to know what got you into design, how your experience has set you up for success in this role, and why you want to join our team.
  
  *** Applicants without work samples will not be considered. ***
  

• Step two: Initial phone call with our recruiter so we can get to know one another
• Step three: An online design exercise to assess your design prowess and get a rough understanding of your experience and skills
• Step four: Technical interview/review over Zoom with the Product Design Manager and several front-end designers
• Step five: Pending all goes well, an offer

Listen, we’ve read a lot of cover letters and have a pretty good sense of what ChatGPT and other AI software sound like. Please show us who you really are and avoid AI-generated cover letters.

For Hiring

• Full-time resident in the United States
• Eligible to work in the United States

For the Work Itself

• Professional experience as a front-end designer (or similar role) using HTML, CSS, and React
• Previous professional experience designing for a web-based product.
• An impressive portfolio of design work.
• Strong sense of composition, UI design, and UX best practices.
• Proficiency with design tools. We use Figma as our preferred UI/prototyping tool. Experience with comparable tools like Sketch, XD, InVision, etc., will also be considered.
• Experience shepherding a project through the cycles of discovery, ideation, testing, and iteration.
• Clear verbal and written communication and the aptitude for writing design specifications.
• Invested - We care about the products we create and the people we create them for, and we all contribute to the vision and direction of our products. Every one of our designers is critical to their team.
• Curious - We aren’t afraid to ask questions, experiment, and iterate. We also love playing with fun new technologies & processes, and we take time every few months to do just that.
• Humble - We always seek opportunities to grow and learn from one another.

We love our team. It’s one of the core pillars we work off of every day, which is why we take care of you as best we can. Here are a few highlights, but you can find all of our benefits here .

Get paid

We pay in the top 10% of the New York City rates (no matter where you live), contribute to your 401k, provide a charitable giving match of up to $2,000 a year, have a generous allowance for continued education, and offer a co-working stipend. The annual salary range for this position is $142,451 – $162,802.

Get out

Enjoy paid Fridays off in the summer, every other Friday off the rest of the year, a month-long sabbatical every five years, one week off between Christmas and New Years, one week off each year to serve with a non-profit, and two weeks paid vacation each year, increasing to three over time.

Be healthy

Generous paid sick time, $200 monthly for physical fitness and mental health, 95% medical and 100% dental premium health coverage.