Lead Product Designer @ AI-powered Personal Growth Startup
About The Position
Our client is an AI-powered journaling and personal development application that's changing how people understand themselves. 500,000+ downloads, 20,000+ paying customers, $2.5M ARR, backed by top-tier venture investors with a $6M seed round. They're looking for a Lead Product Designer to take the torch from their CEO (a career product designer) and own the end-to-end design vision. This is bleeding-edge work: designing AI experiences that don't fully exist yet, grounded by real user research and validated by leading academic institutions. They need someone who builds, not just draws. If prototyping experimental AI interactions excites you more than polishing existing patterns, keep reading.
Requirements
- Senior product designer (6-10 years) with a portfolio that shows range, craft, and taste. Unfinished projects count if they show how your mind works.
- Design engineer mindset. You're comfortable prototyping concepts, not just drawing them. Bonus if you can write front-end code.
- Zero-to-one experience. You've built something from the ground up at a startup, not just executed briefs at a big company. You have the battle scars and the intuition.
- Strong conceptual design chops. They need someone who produces work that makes them say "whoa, they never would have thought of that." Mechanics alone aren't enough.
- Strong systems thinker who can zoom from information architecture to interaction details to pixel-level craft
- Organized and process-driven. You know how to go from nebulousness to concrete: brainstorm → mood boards → review → prototype → iterate. No black boxes.
- Growth mindset above all. Hungry, optimistic, willing to do what it takes. They reward people who grow with them.
- Excellent communicator who can articulate design rationale clearly to engineers, PMs, and founders. Can manage stakeholders and create clarity in ambiguity.
- Personal connection to self-reflection, therapy, or personal development. Their target users are therapy-fluent, and they need a designer who intuitively understands that world.
Responsibilities
- Take the torch on product design vision and strategy across the client's core experience
- Explore and define novel AI-native UX patterns, then ground them in technical feasibility and real system constraints
- Build functional prototypes, not just mockups. Comfort with TypeScript/React is a plus.
- Collaborate directly with engineers, the CEO, and co-founder to map product requirements from nebulous ideas to shipped features
- Run a rigorous design process: brainstorms, mood boards, research, ideation, prototyping, testing, iteration. You bring structure, not wait for it.
- Build out and maintain the design system as you go
- Lead design reviews and critique across the team
- Shape how AI is used within the design workflow itself, thoughtfully and intentionally
Benefits
- Competitive salary: $160K – $200K base
- Equity package (0.25–0.5%+). They flex for the right person.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
