Founding Designer
Emergence Capital Partners · San Francisco
Extracted from the posting
Founding Designer role owning end-to-end product design for AI products, including user research, interaction patterns for AI workflows, wireframes, and high-fidelity designs. Works directly with founders, engineers, and customers, and builds and maintains design systems. Requires 4+ years of product design experience and strong Figma proficiency.
About the Role
We're designing the interfaces for a new generation of AI products. You'll shape how users interact with complex systems – making powerful technology feel simple, intuitive, and trustworthy.
Designing for AI presents unique challenges: How do you help users understand what the AI is doing? How do you build trust when outputs are probabilistic? How do you create workflows that leverage AI capabilities without overwhelming users? You'll be solving these problems daily, defining interaction patterns that don't exist yet.
This is a high-ownership role. You'll be the design voice in the room, working directly with founders, engineers, and customers to define what we build. You should be comfortable with ambiguity, excited by constraints, and motivated by shipping products that real people use.
What You'll Do
- Own product design end-to-end: user research, information architecture, interaction design, and visual design
- Define interaction patterns for AI-native workflows, surfacing AI capabilities, handling uncertainty, and building user trust
- Create wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity designs that communicate product vision clearly
- Conduct user research – interviews, usability testing, data analysis and translate insights into product decisions
- Build and maintain design systems that enable consistent, high-quality UI across the product
- Work closely with engineers through implementation, ensuring design quality in the final product
- Define a clear UX vision and strategy for how enterprise users interact with AI-powered workflows, balancing innovation with usability
- Contribute to product strategy and roadmap discussions as a key voice in what we build
Qualifications
- 4+ years of product design experience, with a portfolio demonstrating taste and end-to-end product design work
- Experience designing complex workflows, data-heavy applications, or enterprise software
- Strong proficiency in Figma and other AI tools, including rapid prototyping/wireframing and design systems
- Solid understanding of interaction design principles and ability to create intuitive user experiences
- Experience conducting user research and translating findings into actionable design decisions
- Excellent visual design skills with attention to typography, color, spacing, and hierarchy
- Have owned design systems and shipped features, not just concepts
- Strong communication skills, ability to articulate design rationale and collaborate effectively with engineers and PMs
- Comfort with ambiguity and rapid iteration in a fast-moving startup environment
Nice to Have
- Experience designing AI-powered products or features
- Background in designing B2B or enterprise applications
- Experience at an early-stage startup or designing 0→1 products that will serve massive deployments to large enterprises
- Familiarity with front-end development (HTML, CSS, React) to facilitate engineer collaboration
- Domain expertise in financial services, legal, healthcare, or other enterprise verticals
- Experience building and scaling design systems from scratch and have scaled it across multiple surfaces (app, web, and brand)
