Design Lead

Build Technologies•New York City, NY

23d

About The Position

Build has created the agentic AI stack for institutional real estate, automating complex development and acquisitions workflows 90% faster than humans to accelerate the world’s most important built projects - digital infrastructure, energy, industrial - from concept to completion. Our mission is to accelerate and amplify the world's most important built projects - inventing a better way to build through a collaboration between human experts and agentic AI. We envision a future where the world's buildings are driven from concept to completion, autonomously. Without delays, cost, and complexity. Enabling people to deliver a magnitude more deals. To make decisions, build relationships and create. To start, we're partnering with the world's biggest built world institutions from $T alternative assets investors, prolific developers and even governments to push the frontier of what's possible. We’re backed by c-suite from Blackstone and OpenAI alongside the world’s best venture capital firms. Join us in shaping the future of the Built World and exponentially accelerate your career in the process. We welcome you to do your life's work here. The role Most companies can separate the brand from the product. The brand is what you say, the product is what you ship, and two different teams own them. At Build that separation doesn't survive contact with the work. We sell outcomes, which means the thing a client receives - the screening, the model, the recommendation they take to their investment committee - is simultaneously the product, the deliverable and the strongest brand expression we will ever make. This role owns all of it. Brand, product, deliverable, and the internal tools our domain experts use to produce the work. One person, one system, one standard, from the first time someone hears the word Build to the artifact that decides a nine-figure commitment. "The deliverable is the brand. There is no separate marketing." You will sit at the centre of the company with the CEO and work directly with engineering and the domain team. There is no layer between you and the thing being made. You will not be handed requirements and asked to make them attractive - you will decide what should exist, design how it works, and either build it or direct the engineering that does. This is a design role with genuine ownership and impact. We are looking for someone with genuine range across brand and product. Identity systems and typography on one side; dense, information-heavy interfaces that professionals rely on under time pressure on the other. Most people are good at one. We need both, held to the same bar, by the same person.

Requirements

Genuine range across brand and product design. You can build an identity system with real rigor, and you have been close enough to product to know that a static guideline document is not a system.
Proficiency in design and engineering. You can ship pixel-perfect work and write a pull request.
Serious information and editorial design ability. Our outputs are documents that carry consequence, and most of the craft is in the typography and restraint.
Strong spatial and systems thinking. You see how the pieces relate before anyone asks you to.
Experience designing for high-stakes decisions, where a user is accountable for acting on what you put in front of them.
Taste you can argue for. Strong opinions are worth nothing here if you cannot bring engineers and domain experts with you.
Comfort with ambiguity - this role requires you to write the playbook, and that's the point.
You operate for growth. You understand that design compounds distribution, and you want the scale because it's the only way that matters.

Nice To Haves

A brand or editorial studio background - you can build an identity system with real rigor, and you have been close enough to product to know that a static guideline document is not a system.
Product design experience where design was the differentiator - you have owned complex, information-dense software that people relied on professionally, and the craft was the reason they chose it.
Founding role or previous founder experience - you've had to be the designer, the PM and the engineer because there was nobody else.

Responsibilities

Update Build's positioning across the brand to match where the company is expanding - new asset classes, new services, new markets.
Evolve the brand through creative direction and the visual artefacts that carry it - campaign, film, motion, print, environment.
Refine the brand voice, and design trust into Build at every layer from brand through to product.
Establish the highest level of taste and identity across every touchpoint, and hold it when velocity argues against it.
Design the client-facing product: the platform, the assistant, and the way work is commissioned and delivered.
Design the deliverables themselves and models clients act on. This is the highest-leverage design surface in the company and today it is the least designed.
Design the internal tools our domain experts use to produce the work. Throughput is our capacity, and the interface is the constraint.
Build one design system that spans brand, product, and deliverable, so a deck and a screen are recognisably the same company.
Explore and invent new formats and new forms of artefact that nobody in our category has made yet.
Direct contractors and the internal engineering team, and raise the standard of everyone who touches the work.
Work end-to-end: prototype it, ship it, and partner with engineering where you aren't building it yourself.