Head of Design

Class 3 Technologies•San Francisco, CA

3d•Remote

About The Position

We're hiring our first design leader to own how people experience our brand and products, starting with Iris, our climate risk platform. Iris turns engineering-grade hazard and damage modeling into decisions made by executives, operations teams, finance leaders, and consultants, most of whom are not risk modelers. The core of this role is translation: taking outputs that are technically defensible and making them understandable, trustworthy, and actionable for the people who need to act on them. Much of your time will go to the Iris experience: how complex results unfold for different roles, how confidence and uncertainty are communicated, how recommendations connect to action, and how we design the journey from understanding risk to actually reducing it. Scores with no confidence behind them no longer survive scrutiny in this industry; design that earns trust is part of the product, not decoration. User experience, interaction, and visual design all work together here, in service of one thing: convincing and enabling people to act on the insights. The brand is the thread that ties it all together. The way risk reads in a report, a one-pager, or a conference booth should be the same language a customer meets inside the product. You'll build that unified visual and narrative system across our website, collateral, case studies, and templates: the machinery that lets a small company feel bigger than its footprint and gives our go-to-market real leverage. One seat holds the product and the brand because a customer's external impression and their in-product experience should reinforce each other.

Requirements

8+ years in design with real leadership scope, spanning user experience, interaction, and visual design
Experience designing complex, data-heavy products that turn technical material into actionable insights for non-expert decision-makers, in climate, risk, science, finance, or an adjacent domain
A portfolio that shows the range: shipped product and identity systems, with the thinking behind why each works
Fluency in modern design tooling (Figma, component-based systems) and genuine curiosity about AI-assisted design workflows
Strong writer: narrative and microcopy are part of the system, not someone else's job
Experience directing other designers or external partners without doing all the execution yourself
US-based; able to be in NYC or SF regularly

Responsibilities

Own design direction across Class 3: one coherent system from product to brand
Build the experiences that will drive adaptation and resilience decisions at scale: understanding risk, comparing options, and acting on recommendations
Set the experience architecture across our products, starting with Iris: role-specific flows, progressive disclosure of complex results, narrative outputs, onboarding, and reporting
Design how trust shows up across all our experiences: provenance, uncertainty, and defensibility made visible
Build and document our brand identity: visual language, voice, and the templates and collateral that carry it, including website, one-pagers, case studies, conference materials, newsletters, and event presence
Equip our go-to-market: strong leave-behinds, follow-up materials, and campaign assets that make every customer conversation land better
Work directly with the founding team, Product, and Marketing; design at Class 3 sits at the table, not downstream of it
Use AI-enabled design and prototyping workflows as everyday instruments, so iteration speed is not limited by headcount