Founding Designer — AI-Native Consumer Experience

Product.ai is building the truth engine for shopping. Every other AI tool summarizes polluted data and calls it an answer. We verify. Ground truth, not opinions. Profitable. Bootstrapped. No outside investors. No board. 25 people outperforming companies 10x our size. Building something new on top of 16 years of commerce infrastructure.

We're hiring a Founding Designer.

Why This Role Exists

Product.ai has three consumer surfaces live - a website, a conversational AI, and a browser extension - with no dedicated design owner. Design decisions are made ad-hoc by engineers and the CEO. As surface count grows, design coherence degrades. Someone needs to own how this product looks, feels, and behaves across every surface - and build it themselves.

This is not a design management role. There is no design team. Your "team" is Claude Code, Cursor, and V0. You define the experience, direct AI to produce it, review its output, and ship working code. If you need other designers to be effective, this isn't your role.

The System You'll Need to Model

Product.ai is three products sharing one intelligence layer:

• A verification engine that tells people what's actually true about products - confidence levels, source provenance, and explicit uncertainty. Trust is calibrated, not maximized.
• Multiple consumer surfaces (web, chat, extension) that serve the same intelligence but demand different interaction patterns. Cross-surface coherence is an unsolved design problem.
• An AI-native production system where the designer orchestrates AI tools rather than managing human designers. Design tokens, component constraints, and prompt architectures govern what AI produces. Quality at speed requires constraint engineering, not manual review of every output.
• A company that moves fast and changes course. The CEO ships infrastructure, redesigns systems, and pivots strategy regularly. You need to independently model where the product is heading and make design decisions that anticipate direction - not wait for a brief.

If reading that list energizes you, keep reading. If it feels overwhelming or underspecified, this isn't the right fit.

What You Will Own

• The verification experience. How confidence gets communicated to users - when we're certain, when we're not, when we don't know enough to answer. Calibrated trust is harder than beautiful interfaces. You'll define interaction patterns that make AI-verified intelligence feel trustworthy without overselling it.
• Cross-surface design coherence. Three surfaces, one product identity. You'll build the design language and shared infrastructure (tokens, components, patterns) that make web, chat, and extension feel unmistakably like the same product - without forcing identical treatment where the surfaces demand different approaches.
• An AI design production system. You'll define the constraint architecture that governs what AI tools produce - design tokens, validation rules, component boundaries, prompt structures. You'll function as editor-in-chief of an AI design studio, reviewing and iterating on AI-generated output at a pace that would require 3-4 traditional designers.

Who You Are

• How you think. You independently form working models of complex systems. You notice where your model is wrong and update quickly. You don't need perfectly defined scope to start - you need enough signal to reason from first principles. You write clearly because clear writing is evidence of clear thought.
• How you work. You move between strategy and implementation without getting stuck in either. You go from "what should the confidence indicator communicate?" to shipping a working component in code - in the same day. AI is your primary production system, not a tool you use occasionally. You've built your own constraint systems for maintaining quality at AI-assisted speed.
• What you've probably built. You've shipped live consumer products - real URLs people use, not concept redesigns in a portfolio. You've likely built or defined a design system from scratch. You've worked in commerce, consumer experience, or conversational interfaces. We care about the artifact and the reasoning more than where you did it.
• Who this isn't for. This role is wrong if you mainly optimize for title, institutional prestige, or narrowly scoped ownership. It's wrong if you need a design team, a research team, or an established design system to be productive. It's wrong if "Figma handoff to engineering" is your primary workflow. You'll be happiest here if you like being close to the problem, close to the code, and accountable for the actual result.

How We Evaluate

We don't run traditional design interviews.

Written artifact. Submit something you've written or built - a product teardown, a design system you created, live URLs, code. Writing quality is our first filter.

Video screen. 5-6 short video responses (2 minutes each, ~15 minutes total). We want to see how you think, not how you present.

Conversation with the founder. A chemistry call to explore how you model systems, make tradeoffs, and push back on ideas.

Paid work trial. 1-2 weeks at your freelance rate, working on a real Product.ai design problem with our actual tools. No design challenges divorced from real work. We both learn more in two weeks of real collaboration than in ten hours of interviews.

Compensation & Ownership

• Total first-year comp: $300,000 - $400,000 (base + equity + profit sharing).
• Base: $225,000 - $300,000. Top of market for design.
• Equity: Profits Interest Units (PIUs) - Class B Membership Interests at $0 strike price. Actual ownership from day one. Capital Gains tax treatment.
• Profit sharing: Annual pro-rata share of free cash flow. Real cash every year, not a promise tied to an exit.
• Liquidity: Annual tender offer - the company buys back vested interests at fair market value. You can turn ownership into cash every year. No waiting for an IPO.
• Benefits: 100% premium coverage for you and your family. Unlimited PTO that we actually use.

This is a partnership structure. When the company wins, you win - in real, liquid dollars, every year.

Based in Santa Monica. Hybrid, with flexibility. For the right builder, we're open to remote.

Apply here: https://product.ai/join/founding-designer

Include your strongest written artifact with your application. A product teardown, a design system doc, a blog post, live URLs - something that shows how you think, not just what you've designed.