Senior Product Designer, Games

The mission of The New York Times is to seek the truth and help people understand the world. That means independent journalism is at the heart of all we do as a company. It’s why we have a world-renowned newsroom that sends journalists to report on the ground from nearly 160 countries. It’s why we focus deeply on how our readers will experience our journalism, from print to audio to a world-class digital and app destination. And it’s why our business strategy centers on making journalism so good that it’s worth paying for.

Mission Overview & Responsibilities:

The Games team at The New York Times creates and evolves experiences across Wordle, Connections, Spelling Bee, the Daily Crossword, and more. We're looking for a Senior Product Designer to develop new Games experiences and evolve core experiences across web and apps. Our Senior Product Designers are trusted individual contributors who deepen expertise in a craft and use product thinking to deliver clear, sophisticated, playful experiences. You will report to the Design Director of Product Design for Games.

This is a hybrid role based in our New York City headquarters, with an expectation of working onsite 3+ days per week.

Responsibilities

• Partner with Product, Engineering, and cross-functional teammates on product strategy and discovery. Frame complex problems, clarify audience needs, and shape opportunities across Games products and features.
• Lead design exploration before detailed execution: identify the work to be done, produce multiple divergent solutions, develop concrete approaches, and collaborate to narrow directions and establish requirements.
• Prototype and validate ideas through user testing. Present design rationale and build alignment around decisions.
• Turn concepts into detailed, production-ready flows, mocks, screens, and specifications. Work with engineers and product teams on implementation tradeoffs and shipped experiences.
• Contribute to Figma libraries, shared design systems, and engineering documentation that align with implemented component libraries. Help ensure experiences across web and apps meet brand and accessibility standards.
• Facilitate discovery sessions and contribute to design rituals. Mentor teammates and improve team processes and documentation.
• Support The Times's value of journalistic independence and our mission to seek the truth and help people understand the world.

Responsibilities

• Partner with Product, Engineering, and cross-functional teammates on product strategy and discovery. Frame complex problems, clarify audience needs, and shape opportunities across Games products and features.
• Lead design exploration before detailed execution: identify the work to be done, produce multiple divergent solutions, develop concrete approaches, and collaborate to narrow directions and establish requirements.
• Prototype and validate ideas through user testing. Present design rationale and build alignment around decisions.
• Turn concepts into detailed, production-ready flows, mocks, screens, and specifications. Work with engineers and product teams on implementation tradeoffs and shipped experiences.
• Contribute to Figma libraries, shared design systems, and engineering documentation that align with implemented component libraries. Help ensure experiences across web and apps meet brand and accessibility standards.
• Facilitate discovery sessions and contribute to design rituals. Mentor teammates and improve team processes and documentation.
• Support The Times's value of journalistic independence and our mission to seek the truth and help people understand the world.

Basic Qualifications:

• 4+ years of design experience working within cross-functional teams
• A portfolio that shows your thought process and finished design work
• Demonstrated experience building, maintaining, and applying design systems in environments with legacy UI or multiple parallel component libraries
• Fluency in UX best practices for responsive web and mobile
• Knowledge of usability and accessible, inclusive design (including typography scales, contrast, motion, and semantics)
• Proficiency in Figma and Rive or equivalent software

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience contributing to a design system across web and native apps
• Partnered with platform or infrastructure teams on foundational refactors or component-library migrations
• Experience shaping design practices such as critiques, documentation, or templates; facilitating discovery with stakeholders; and aligning design intent with implementation through design tokens, component APIs, and specifications

REQ-020867

#LI-Hybrid

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Compensation and Benefits For This Role

In addition to base salary, this role is also eligible for variable pay, such as an annual bonus and restricted stock. Benefits include medical, dental and vision benefits, Flexible Spending Accounts (F.S.A.s), a company-matching 401(k) plan, employee stock purchase plan, paid vacation, paid sick days, paid parental leave, tuition reimbursement and professional development programs.

The annual base pay range for this role is between:

$120,000—$145,000 USD

Candidate Use of GenAI Tools

We’re excited to learn more about you and your experience. To keep our hiring process as fair and authentic as possible, we ask that you submit your own work and not use GenAI tools to generate substantive content during the application and interview process.

If you’re an engineering candidate, we’ll let you know what specific GenAI tools you are permitted to use for your technical assessment.

The New York Times Company is committed to being the world’s best source of independent, reliable and quality journalism. To do so, we embrace a diverse workforce that has a broad range of backgrounds and experiences across our ranks, at all levels of the organization. We encourage people from all backgrounds to apply.

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