AQ is looking for a Senior Product Designer to join our team in shaping how global products and services are experienced in Japan, by combining rigorous design practices with deep cultural insight.
Working closely with researchers, product managers, engineers, and marketers you will help bring product UX to the level of clarity and quality expected in Japan, while seeking opportunities for local ideas to inform global product thinking.
AQ is a Tokyo-based independent design and research studio with 20 years of experience helping international teams at companies like Google, Indeed, and American Express design products that work for Japan.
We’re primarily hiring for a full-time role, but are also open to project-based or fractional arrangements for candidates who are a strong fit for the position.
Recent designer-led projects have included:
Your responsibilities may include:
You’ll work closely alongside AQ’s research practice — partnering with researchers to translate insights into clear product directions and design decisions.
You’ll also contribute to AQ’s own communications and self-initiated projects, and help evolve how we work — from tooling and workflows to quality standards and emerging technologies.
This includes exploring and thoughtfully integrating new tools (including AI-assisted workflows) where they improve quality or efficiency, and contributing to internal efforts that make space for experimentation and shared learning.
This is a Tokyo-based role for someone working in digital product design for at least five years with a strong sense of design craftsmanship, product thinking and fluency in collaboration.
We work a flextime day with core hours between 10:30 and 3:30. We follow a standard five day work week, with time off for Japanese national holidays.
All full time roles include both paid time off and paid sick leave. We also offer caregiver leave, bereavement leave, and family leave.
We're a distributed team with no in-office quota. Members work from home, AQ's Jingumae studio, our creative retreat space in Yamanashi, or temporarily from elsewhere. Co-presence follows project and practice needs—the design team meets weekly, and we hold team retreats a few times a year.
AQ is a practitioner-owned and led independent design and research studio co-founded in 2004 in Tokyo.
What we make — and how we make it — is shaped by, and can in turn shape, language, customs, art, values, infrastructure, buildings and cities. AQ designs through this lens together with colleagues and clients, applying it not only to product work, but also to projects like the curation of Open Studio events or the concept and design of our retreat space in Yatsugatake.
The tools, processes, and expectations of design are changing continuously. Many designers are left simultaneously yearning for grounding and space to experiment. At AQ, we co-create the space to experiment and learn together, tending to our relationships and building feedback loops that invite reflection. We see changes to tooling and potential gains in productivity as a distracting second to AI's ability to enable a closer understanding of the material of design — a means of sharpening our taste and point of view, and more clearly seeing the elements and decisions which we care most deeply for.
As an independent studio in client services, we have the autonomy to choose to what ends we apply these tools, how and where we experiment. We also participate in how other organizations with diverse needs and constraints do the same, providing us with a stream of experience "data" beyond the scale of our own org and the depth that can be gleaned from news headlines and Reddit. Again, making sure the sense making and feedback loops are there and shared, helps ground our conclusions and decisions in tangible values and context.
Themes, ideas and insights weave their way back and forth between our lives at and outside of AQ. Our individual, subjective experiences, interests and world views into project spaces and vice versa, we believe both for the richer. Inquiries which began as client briefs have led some of us to start new sports, organize our personal finances, or reimagine how we care for aging parents.
In whatever ways AQ has become a more interesting, lifestyle-enriching place to work over the years, it was because one of us saw something we wanted to try, brought it to the group, and ultimately made it happen. This has happened over and over again largely in the absence of formal “culture” edicts or programs, because there is a shared underlying belief that life at work can and should be so much better, but only if we make it happen for ourselves.
Please send an introduction email to hello at aqworks dot com, with a CV and a link to an online portfolio. We will respond to all serious applications within 2-3 business days.
Our process typically involves 3-4 conversations with team members, followed by a small paid, collaborative design project. The project is intended to give both you and us a sense of how we think and work together in a project context typical of the role.
We aim to make an offer within 4–6 weeks of the first interview.
