Founding Product Designer

Description

The company is building AI-powered software for higher education with a focus on faculty. Its goal is to become the AI-native system of record for faculty data.

The platform brings fragmented workflows into one intelligent system covering annual reviews, promotion and tenure, appointment tracking and more, removing manual data entry and helping institutions make better decisions. The team is small, product-focused and works on the future of higher education.

This is the company's first full-time designer role. You will own how the product looks, feels and works, across the data-dense screens administrators use daily, the faculty-facing experiences, and the website and materials used to introduce the company to new institutions.

The role calls for 7 or more years of experience, including meaningful time shipping complex B2B or SaaS products. You will work directly with engineering and leadership and set up how design works at the company, including the system, the process and the quality standard. The company's way of working is described in a blog post:

Location: Seattle, on-site with the engineering team in Pioneer Square.

Responsibilities

• Take features from a vague customer problem to a shipped, polished result, covering workflows, information architecture, interaction design and visual design.
• Build and maintain the company's design system, including components, tokens and patterns, with particular attention to the dense tables and grids used for faculty data.
• Run interviews, usability tests and site visits with faculty, department administrators and faculty affairs teams at customer institutions, and translate findings into product direction.
• Build high-fidelity prototypes in HTML and CSS, pair with engineers, and ship front-end polish fixes yourself. Claude and other AI tools are part of your everyday toolkit.
• Lead design for the website, sales and demo materials, and documents shared with prospective customers.
• Influence what gets built and why, not only how it looks.

Requirements

• 7 or more years of product design experience, with a portfolio showing complex, workflow-heavy or data-dense products shipped to real users.
• Experience building or substantially evolving a design system.
• Hands-on user research experience, including planning and running your own studies.
• Working knowledge of front-end code in HTML and CSS.
• Brand or marketing design experience is a strong plus.
• Experience in higher education, healthcare, HR or other enterprise or regulated software is a plus but not required.
• Authorized to work in the United States as a citizen or green card holder. The company cannot sponsor visas at this time.
• Willing to work on-site in Seattle five days per week.

Conditions

Based in Seattle, working on-site with the engineering team in Pioneer Square five days per week.