Freelance Surface Pattern Design Jobs in Oregon (NOW HIRING)

Every year, people across the world spend nearly one trillion dollars on groceries. It's an industry that's been around for centuries. Food itself, however, has been a constant in people's lives since the beginning of time. Yes, sustenance is essential, but it's also much more than that. Food can be a part of a daily ritual or a special moment that resonates with people on a meaningful and emotional level. It can be a much-needed break in a long day, a taste that brings back memories, a creative experiment, a shared meal with loved ones, or even comfort during a hard time. Whether it's a special occasion or an everyday occurrence, it should always be easy for people to get the ingredients they need.

The Instacart Design Team is dedicated to making grocery shopping effortless for everyone and finding solutions to large-scale opportunities that will forever change the way people feed themselves and their loved ones. We're a four sided marketplace and design for the needs of Consumer, Shoppers, Retailers, and Advertisers.

Within the Instacart Design org, we have exciting roles that will drive meaningful business impact through thoughtful strategy, experimentation, and high-quality execution. We design the end-to-end journeys that help customers discover, understand, and feel the undeniable value of Instacart, putting empathy for both prospective and existing members at the center of every decision. Our team blends product thinking, brand-forward storytelling, and behavioral insight to create cohesive, high-performing growth experiences. We pride ourselves on a culture of experimentation, accountability, and craft, continuously evolving how we design for conversion, retention, and long-term customer value.

We're hiring for a Staff Experience Designer to join the Core Experience team and lead work across multiple touchpoints along our end to end online grocery experience in app. You'll obsess user, cultural and industry shifts in food and shopping spaces and inspire new features that come with strong value propositions that can be uniquely owned by the Intacart brand experience and online grocery ecosystem. This role will need to work very closely with teams across the end to end shopping experience as well as new modalities that help deliver experiences through AI and agentic based conversational interfaces. This is a high-impact, highly collaborative role partnering closely with Product, Engineering, Marketing, Brand, Data Science, and Research to drive measurable business outcomes while strengthening customer trust, affinity for the brand and long-term loyalty. 

Daily Rhythms and Samples of Work

• Drive and lead experiences across consumer-facing products to create highly personalized journeys that meet households where they are - their routines, their needs, their goals - and build new layers of value into the core grocery experience.
• Lead end-to-end experience design briefs across all surfaces and modalities, including agentic interfaces, that deepen how customers discover, shop, and build lasting habits with Instacart.
• Craft narratives, naming, and value propositions for experiences and features, creating artifacts (strategy docs, flows, storyboards, internal decks) that help teams socialize strategies and ideas.
• Define and own experience frameworks that map key journeys (first 3 orders, building repeat patterns, subscription adoption, household management) and clearly articulate the beats, rhythms, and jobs to be done at each step.
• Shape content, hierarchy, and information architecture across surfaces: define how information is structured, named, and prioritized so users have clear comprehension at every step while the business and partners get the right visibility where it matters.
• Codify experiential principles, functional and emotional, to guide what users should understand, decide, and feel across flows, then translate those principles into patterns, content hierarchies, and interaction rules that scale across teams.
• Use AI-assisted prototyping and concept development as a core part of your practice, providing strong art direction, references, and experiential intent to generate flows and concepts that align with Instacart's design system, brand positioning, and evolving interaction patterns.
• Design for visual clarity, pacing, and density, establishing patterns, grids, and rules that govern how modules, carousels, and key placements work (above vs. below the fold) to balance user needs, business objectives, and partner value.
• Work with Research, and sometimes lead or plan it yourself, to uncover insights about how customers shop, build routines, and evolve over their lifecycle with Instacart, then translate those insights into concrete journey maps, flows, and experiential principles.
• Raise the bar for experience-led thinking across the pods, mentoring partners on how to think in journeys and emotions rather than just screens, and advocating for cohesive, principle-driven experiences that feel uniquely Instacart.

• 15+ years of experience designing consumer-facing digital products and experiences across web and mobile, with a portfolio that highlights complex, multi-step journeys and end-to-end flows including marketing channels like social, crm, and campaigns.
• Strong track record of projects that demonstrate a fluency and depth in at least two design languages: content design, UX/product design, visual design, design strategy, design research -and demonstrable fluency collaborating across the others.
• Driven by continuity, consistency, cohesion, comprehension and brand differentiation with an exceptional eye towards design system detail.
• Proven ability to partner with product and business leaders as you direct multiple design disciplines through clear briefs, concept iteration, testing, executive reviews and feature launches.
• An overwhelming fascination with human behaviors, pop, food, social and shopping culture, communication, visualization, design systems, language, content hierarchy, and the evolving models of producing world class design products for our future conditions. 
• You are a writer. You have exceptional communications skills with clear strengths in structured strategic storytelling, context setting, visually compelling and polished  presentations that inspire, and clear decisions making frameworks/concepts that accelerate agreements to move forward. 
• Case studies of brand-centric product design work that is driven by user insights, data science, strategic frameworks, and metrics of impact to the business.
• Track record of navigating ambiguity and multi-stakeholder environments, creating structure from loosely defined opportunity areas and guiding teams toward alignment.
• Fluency in google slides and figma is a must with desire for additional design or generative tools including but not limited to: Claude Code, Loveable, Cursor, and ChatGPT.

• Experience designing for marketplaces, e-commerce, grocery, CPG, or membership/subscription products, especially where lifecycle, growth, or repeat behavior is critical.
• Experience shaping onboarding, activation, and retention journeys, including first-order and early repeat experiences that build habits, loyalty, and personalization over time.
• Familiarity with domains like meal planning, nutrition, health goals, and allergy/restriction management, personalization and how they intersect with household grocery behavior.
• Experience designing high-visibility surfaces such as home, personalized feeds, and merchandising placements-including how to manage density, stacking, carousels, and above-the-fold/break strategies for maximum clarity and impact.
• Experience working within and evolving large-scale design systems, ensuring AI- and human-produced flows align to system constraints while allowing room for innovation.
• Comfort working with distributed, cross-functional teams across time zones, and influencing outcomes on multi-team initiatives without direct authority.

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