Founding Product Designer

Knit•New York, NY

2d•$210,000 - $240,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Knit is an AI-native research agency that combines AI-native tooling with expert researchers to help major brands make confident decisions through customer research. The company recently closed its Series B and has raised more than $60 million to date. Its team of approximately 80 is US-remote-friendly, with headquarters in New York City. Knit is hiring its first Product Designer to define and elevate the product experience. This hands-on individual contributor will own the end-to-end user experience, establish the product design language and design system, and shape how human researchers and AI agents interact. The role involves rethinking complex workflows and developing intuitive, high-impact agentic software. The designer will work directly with the Chief Product Officer, product managers, engineers, researchers, and customers, with significant ownership and autonomy. As the company grows, there may be an opportunity to build a team and scale the design function.

Requirements

At least 7 years of product design experience.
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.
Portfolio demonstrating strong visual taste, attention to detail, and polished product interfaces.
Strong UX and product judgment, including the ability to simplify complex workflows, solve ambiguous user problems, and design intuitive experiences that serve user needs and business goals.
Understanding of frontend development principles and constraints; ability to collaborate closely with engineers and care about implementation quality.
Experience conducting user interviews, usability testing, and workflow analysis to inform design decisions.
Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain design decisions, discuss tradeoffs, challenge assumptions, and work 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

Own design projects from problem discovery and early concepts through prototyping, implementation, production, and iteration; collaborate with product managers and engineers to ship products.
Create and maintain Knit’s design system, including reusable components, patterns, guidelines, and standards for use by product managers, engineers, and AI agents.
Own the product’s visual quality and consistency, ensuring interfaces are polished, intuitive, and aligned with Knit’s brand.
Continuously evaluate the product, identify usability issues and improvement opportunities, simplify complex workflows, and improve information architecture and interactions.
Develop intuitive end-to-end experiences, determining when an existing interface should be improved and when the experience should be rethought.
Build deep user understanding by working with enterprise customers, researchers, and internal teams; observe users and conduct interviews and usability tests.
Use qualitative and quantitative research, including tools such as Amplitude, to inform design decisions and understand user behavior at scale.
Look beyond users’ stated requests to understand the underlying problems they are trying to solve.