UI/UX Designer at Handshake

Location: Mostly Remote . Full-time

We're building two products at Handshake.

The first is our core platform. A renovation payment protection and escrow product for Singapore's renovation industry. It protects homeowners by holding funds in milestone-based escrow, and gives interior designers structured, guaranteed payment flows. It solves a real, painful problem in an industry that's been running on blind trust and WhatsApp for decades.

The second is Nucleus. An invoicing and payment collection platform built from the ground up for SME service businesses. Marketing agencies, branding studios, creative consultancies, freelancers. The people who are great at what they do but spend too much time chasing payments, recreating the same invoice every month, and losing track of what's actually been paid.

Both products share the same regulated infrastructure. The design problems are completely different.

We need one person to own the design of both.

What you'll actually be doing

• Build our design foundations from scratch. Design system, component library, visual language, interaction patterns across both products
• Own the full design process end to end. Discovery, flows, wireframes, high-fidelity, handoff. No one is managing this for you
• Take what are genuinely complex financial workflows and make them feel obvious, easy, and trustworthy to real users
• Work directly with the founder with tight feedback loops and full context
• Constantly be asking: how do we compress this timeline What can we do in 2 days that most teams take 2 weeks to do

Who we're looking for

The honest version: experience is nice but it's not the filter. What actually matters is this.

You have deep intuition for how people think and feel when they use a product. You understand what creates friction, what creates anxiety, what builds trust. And you design for all of it without being told to. You've shipped real products and watched real users use them. Your portfolio is live work, not concept decks.

You see design as a system, not a collection of screens. Every decision you make connects to something bigger. You care about the details that most people don't notice but everyone feels.

You use AI tools in a way that actually makes you faster and better. Not just to generate noise. You've figured out how to 10x your output without compromising the quality of your thinking.

You don't wait for a perfect brief. You extract what you need, make smart assumptions, ship something, and iterate. You take full ownership over the entire design process like it's your own product, because here, it basically is. You see problems before they're pointed out to you. You move on things without being asked.

You're driven in a specific way. Not in a hustle-culture way. In a I genuinely can't leave something at good enough way. You're always learning, always looking at what you made last month and thinking you'd do it differently now. That gap between where you are and where you want to be is what keeps you moving. Not anxiety, but genuine hunger to get better.

You communicate clearly. You can explain why a decision matters, not just what it looks like. And you're secure enough to kill your own work when something better comes along.

Strong signals we'll look for

• You have a real point of view on design and you can back it up
• You think about conversion and drop-off, not just how something looks
• You understand what it means to design for trust, especially in a context involving money
• You've worked in fintech, SaaS, or any product where the stakes for users are real (nice to have, not required)
• Previous experience in a 0 to 1 or early-stage environment

What this isn't

A role where you'll get polished briefs and clean handoffs. A place where that looks good is the bar. A team where design is downstream of everything else.

Why this is a great role right now

You're coming in at the ground level of two genuinely interesting product problems. Nothing is locked in. The design foundations don't exist yet. You're building them. You'll work directly with the founder, your work ships fast, and you'll see the real impact of every decision you make.

To apply

Send your portfolio and a short note on why this problem is the right one for you to be working on right now to [Confidential Information]e

We don't shortlist on CVs. We shortlist on work and how you think.