Founding Product Designer

Knit•New York City, NY

About The Position

Knit is an AI-native research agency that combines AI-native tools with expert researchers to deliver quantitative and qualitative customer insights to major brands. The company has raised more than $60 million through its Series B and has a team of approximately 80. It is US remote friendly and headquartered in New York City. Knit is seeking its first product designer to define and elevate the product experience. The designer will own the end-to-end user experience, establish the product design language and design system, and shape how researchers and AI agents interact. This is a hands-on individual-contributor role with significant ownership and autonomy, working directly with the Chief Product Officer, product managers, engineers, researchers, and customers. There may be an opportunity over time to build a team and scale the design function.

Requirements

At least 7 years of product design experience.
A track record of independently owning, designing, and shipping digital products from discovery through launch at early-stage startups.
Experience as a founding or early designer who helped establish a company's design standards and practices.
Experience building and maintaining scalable design systems, reusable components, and consistent patterns.
Experience working in fast-moving environments and prototyping, testing, iterating, and shipping quickly while balancing speed and polish.
A portfolio demonstrating beautifully designed product interfaces, strong visual taste, attention to detail, and polish.
Strong UX and product judgment, including the ability to simplify complex workflows, solve ambiguous user problems, and design intuitive experiences that meet user needs and business goals.
Understanding of frontend development principles and constraints, ability to collaborate closely with engineers, and care for implementation quality.
Experience conducting user interviews, usability testing, and workflow analysis to inform design decisions.
Ability to explain design decisions, discuss tradeoffs, challenge assumptions, and collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams.

Nice To Haves

Experience designing complex B2B SaaS, enterprise software, data-heavy products, or productivity tools.
Experience designing AI-native products, including conversational interfaces, agentic workflows, or human-in-the-loop experiences.
Familiarity with consumer research, analytics, or research operations.

Responsibilities

Lead design initiatives from problem discovery and early concepts through prototyping, implementation, and iteration, partnering with product managers and engineers to ship products.
Make thoughtful tradeoffs, move quickly, and take ownership of the quality of shipped work.
Create and maintain a design system of reusable components, patterns, and guidelines for use by product managers, engineers, and AI agents.
Establish design standards and ensure visual quality, consistency, polish, usability, and alignment with Knit's brand.
Continuously evaluate the product to identify usability issues and opportunities for improvement.
Simplify complex workflows, rethink information architecture and interactions, and design intuitive end-to-end experiences.
Conduct qualitative and quantitative research with enterprise customers, researchers, and internal teams to understand needs, workflows, and challenges.
Observe users, conduct interviews and usability tests, and use findings to inform design decisions.
Use product analytics tools such as Amplitude to understand user behavior at scale.
Look beyond users' stated requests to understand the problems they are trying to solve.