We joined Braintrust mid-transition to AIR 2.0 and redesigned the core recruiter experience, then carried that work into their talent Marketplace.
Braintrust runs two products. AIR is an AI recruiter: it runs first-round video interviews and gives hiring teams scorecards, while humans keep the final decision. Marketplace is the talent network where freelancers sign up, build profiles, apply to jobs, and get paid, and where Braintrust's own team matches talent to clients.
AIR was being rebuilt as AIR 2.0, and the interface had to catch up. Screens needed modernizing, flows like job creation were spread across disconnected steps, and there was no shared design system holding the product together. On the Marketplace side, onboarding, identity checks, and internal talent search had grown cumbersome; the team searching ~400k talent records had fallen back to Excel.
We started by reconstructing the existing AIR 2 screens in Figma and auditing them, then built a design system for each product. From there we worked through the roadmap in weekly sprints, moving each feature from brief to explorations to a developer-ready handoff, and ran QA reviews against staging to keep the build matching the designs.
AIR 2.0 was where Braintrust needed the most help, and it holds most of our work: a new design system, a single job-creation flow, role-based dashboards, and a clearer candidate experience.
Design system and audit. We rebuilt the AIR 2 screens in Figma, audited every UI change across the job dashboard, side navigation, candidate drawer, AI interview scorecard, and profile and admin screens, and created an AIR 2.0 styleguide. We also designed a dark mode and ran QA on the AIR 2 MVP before release.
Job creation in one flow. Creating a job used to mean jumping between disconnected steps. We redesigned it as one tabbed flow (role details, interview, prescreening, and customization), plus publishing, templates and a question bank, translations, and a review round before a job goes live. AIR uses the job description to write interview questions, so the flow coaches recruiters to give it the detail it needs.
Prescreening. We mapped the prescreening flow end to end and designed a developer-ready version for both recruiters and candidates.
Dashboards split by role. We designed separate dashboard views for recruiters and admins, each in an MVP version and a more ambitious version, plus a customize mode for admins. We also explored gamification for recruiters: streaks, interviews conducted, hours saved, and a leaderboard.
Candidate experience. We designed interview landing pages, invitations, video screening, a retake flow, a pacing cue during interviews, and candidate tags. We also rewrote how AIR explains its role to candidates, making clear that the hiring team reviews AI assessments and that candidates can ask how they were used.
Surfacing interview issues. We designed clearer ways to flag interview problems to clients so they can trust the scorecards they review.
On Marketplace, we smoothed the path from sign-up to first application and rebuilt the tool Braintrust's own team uses to find talent.
Expert Contributors Portal 2.0. Braintrust's client team searches ~400k talent records here, and it was their number-one Marketplace priority. We replaced a wide, hard-to-scan table with candidate cards that show why each person matched the search, made applied filters visible and editable as chips, and added a candidate drawer with work history, past engagements, ratings, and every application in one place. We also designed Rosters, saved shortlists teams can share across searches.
Sign-up and profile onboarding. We designed LinkedIn onboarding, a profile completion wizard that auto-fills from a resume, phone number collection with consent, and SMS verification.
Identity and trust. We designed the verify-identity and account-freeze flows, a verified badge, and a clear experience for people in countries Braintrust's banking doesn't support yet.
Applying to jobs. We designed the moments around an application: confirmation screens, "not a fit" messaging, and emails that keep applicants updated at each stage.
Design system and audit. We built a Marketplace styleguide and are auditing the live product to fill gaps in it.
AIR 2.0 now has a modern, consistent interface built on its own design system, with job creation in one flow and dashboards shaped around how recruiters and admins actually work. Marketplace has a clearer onboarding path for talent and an internal search tool built for speed instead of spreadsheets. Each product now has its own styleguide and component library for engineers to build on.
