Founding Product Designer

Beacon Holdings•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Beacon is building technology infrastructure for everyday businesses, organizations, and services that mainstream technology has often overlooked. It acquires, operates, and grows vertical market software companies, investing in their continued growth and supporting them with an AI-native platform. Beacon describes itself as a technology company and operator, not a financial firm, and says it holds acquired businesses permanently. As the Design Lead, you will turn difficult business problems into products people depend on. You will embed with portfolio companies, work with customers and operators, and partner with designers and engineers from discovery through adoption. Assignments may include modernizing mission-critical industrial software or transforming operations through AI-powered workflows. The role involves building and delivering working solutions, putting them into users’ hands, and evaluating whether they improve the business. It includes direct customer contact, ownership beyond launch, and sharing successful ideas as reusable building blocks across companies. You will identify and prioritize problems with portfolio teams, define bounded pilots and measures of success, simplify processes, and lead delivery with product, engineering, and design partners. You will stay involved through testing, rollout, training, adoption, measurement, and handoff to accepted business and technical owners. You will assess value using measures such as recurring use, quality, time, and total cost, and recommend whether to improve, expand, or stop a pilot. The role is not a production-engineering, sales, or permanent-support position. Engineers own implementation and technical reliability; designers own interaction quality and usability; company owners approve access and rollout and accept business results.

Requirements

Evidence of taking ambiguous product or operational problems through delivery to sustained use and measurable improvement.
Product judgment, including the ability to challenge requests, uncover constraints, and prioritize.
Technical fluency in AI-enabled products, integrations, data, and evaluations.
Ability to inspect behavior and traces, prototype ideas, and discuss reliability, cost, and technical tradeoffs with engineers.
Ability to earn trust with operators and leaders, communicate clearly, and lead cross-functional work without formal authority.
Sound judgment about risk, permissions, human review, and when not to automate.

Nice To Haves

Production AI workflow experience.

Responsibilities

Understand customer needs and product priorities with portfolio teams by observing real work, exceptions, decisions, handoffs, and constraints.
Prioritize problems based on value, feasibility, effort, risk, and potential for reuse.
Agree with product or business owners on a bounded pilot, its users, baseline, success criteria, and stop conditions.
Simplify processes before deciding where people, software, or agents should be involved.
Set requirements and priorities, and partner with portfolio product and engineering teams and designers as needed to test the smallest complete solution.
Resolve dependencies and adjust scope based on what is learned during delivery.
Test solutions with customers and operators, protect reliability and continuity, define failure and recovery paths, and organize rollout and training.
Improve solutions through live feedback and support adoption beyond launch.
Measure accepted results, recurring use, quality, time, and total cost, including review, rework, and support.
Distinguish estimated capacity released from realized savings and recommend whether to improve, expand, or stop a deployment.
Hand off work to named business and technical owners and obtain their acceptance.
Capture reusable workflows, evaluation cases, and lessons, and use Arc where it helps deployment.
Bring field evidence to Arc and Cortex, which unites business context, data, and insights.