Founding Product Designer

Emerge • New York, NY

5d • Onsite

About The Position

Emerge Career's mission is to break the cycle of poverty and incarceration by creating pathways to second chances through an all-in-one platform embedded within the criminal justice system. The platform recruits, trains, and places justice-impacted individuals into careers. The company aims to become a unified workforce development system, replacing traditional job centers with an integrated, tech-powered solution. Emerge Career has demonstrated significantly higher graduation and employment rates compared to existing programs, with alumni earning substantially more. The founding team has prior experience co-founding Ameelio, a successful tech nonprofit in the criminal justice space. Emerge Career addresses recidivism and labor shortages by providing effective workforce development programs inside and outside of prison, equipping individuals with skills for stable employment.

Requirements

• Willing to relocate and work in-person in New York City.
• Experience taking a project from 0 to 1 (e.g., led a project, founder, early-stage startup employee).
• Love working with React and TypeScript.
• Experience with Figma.
• Experience collaborating with operations or support teams.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in ed-tech.
• Experience with UX research.

Responsibilities

• Build features in React and TypeScript.
• Understand the human problem behind student disengagement and persistence.
• Conduct direct conversations and usability research with students.
• Prototype quickly, ship real software, and measure its impact.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, design, and program operations.
• Inspire students to invest in their future through good design.
• Own outcomes end to end.
• Talk to students frequently to gather feedback and iterate on products.
• Originate ideas based on user conversations, instincts, and strategy.
• Test MVPs in production and iterate based on real feedback.
• Design interfaces, messages, and milestones that help students stay committed.
• Prototype quickly, ship real software, measure impact, and iterate.
• Document work clearly for complex projects involving multiple teams.
• Create awareness of changes impacting operations and explain feature effects on training and service delivery.

Benefits

• Paid Work Trial (2-5 days) onsite with travel expenses covered, paid $500 per day.
• Opportunity to work on a mission-driven project with significant impact.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed