How to Strategize Your Way Into Your Dream Company
Don't miss this live session with Julia Ysabela Fernandez (Adobe) and Dan Cariño (The Open AI Deployment Company) where you'll be walked through what actually moves the needle in the hiring practice, using Dan's own career arc as evidence and what AI has changed thus far.
About the event
Companies don't hire on talent. They hire on the confidence that you'll operate well in their company. Most designer job searches ignore this. The moves that actually move the needle happen long before you apply, and they're about building a specific signal for a specific kind of company.
Dan walks through what that looks like in practice, using his own career arc as evidence. The core idea: startups, scaleups, and FAANG each shape a designer differently, produce different case studies, and read as a different kind of signal in a hiring loop. Knowing which one you're optimising for changes everything, which roles to take, which projects to fight for, which case studies to write. He'll cover why he turned Meta down in 2022, why a startup was the most career-defining move he made, and what to do if you're stuck in the wrong stage for the company you want.
Then: what AI changes. The signal top companies look for in a senior designer is shifting fast, and a 5-year-old playbook won't get you in anymore. Dan ran this exact playbook on himself across 2026, after leaving Meta, and shared the whole search publicly along the way. You'll walk away with a way to read what signal a target company is buying, an honest read on the signal you currently send, and a plan for what to change in the next 6–12 months to close the gap.
About Dan
Dan Cariño is a Senior Product Designer whose career has been an intentional climb: from UX researcher in Stockholm, to a product design role at a Hong Kong startup, to senior design at H&M Group, Klarna, and most recently Meta in London, where his role was cut in early 2026. He spent the months after publicly documenting on Instagram his job search, and how he repositioned his career for the AI shift reshaping the design industry.
Links
YouTube: dan.carino
LinkedIn: dancarino
Instagram: ux.dancarino
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