Product Designer

Adapt.com•San Francisco, CA

5h•$180,000 - $220,000•Onsite

About The Position

We're hiring our founding designer to join the small, but cracked, product and engineering teams at Adapt. This is the design role at Adapt: you are capable of owning look-and-feel for the entire surface area — product, brand, website, docs, decks, social, every pixel a customer or prospect ever sees. We don't expect you to be a career specialist on both product and brand. We’re looking for someone who is capable and curious enough to move fluidly between a flow in the product, a wordmark, a marketing page, a launch video, and the system that holds it all together. We are particularly seeking a designer who cares deeply about taste, craft, and shipping — someone who can sharpen the visual identity that got us here, build the design system that takes us further, and prototype (and ship) in code when that's the fastest way. We care about the craft (yes, we vibe a little too), and we want someone who can set the bar for what Adapt looks and feels like for the next decade.

Requirements

4-7+ years of professional design experience, ideally spanning both product and brand
Experience working at an early stage (seed, Series A, Series B) startup, or a strong portfolio of personal/side projects that shows range
Expertise in Figma, with fluency in modern prototyping methods
Comfort writing front-end code — HTML/CSS/Tailwind at minimum, ideally React — and shipping your own work to production with engineers (or directly)
A portfolio that shows real range: shipped product surfaces, brand identity work, marketing pages, illustration or motion, and a point of view on each
Strong interest in many of the latest and greatest AI tools and models, and an opinion on what AI products should feel like
Consistent track-record of design work that you drove end-to-end — from the customer problem through the final shipped pixel
Ability to break down a vague, ambiguous problem into something concrete and shippable (you may have found yourself saying "the fastest way to decide this is to prototype it")
Care deeply about users — you've got receipts of customer-driven design decisions, and when something you designed frustrates someone, you feel it
A genuine desire to grow the craft of design and product-building (you could call it "taste"), with an eye for the little big details across type, color, motion, copy, and information density

Nice To Haves

Prefer Bay Area applicants today.

Responsibilities

Own design end-to-end — from the customer Slack thread, through exploration and shipping, all the way to the launch blog post and the social posts (we call it "ship and tell").
Design, prototype, and ship surfaces — product flows, brand systems, marketing pages, launch assets — that just feel right.
Ship boulders (like product surfaces and brand systems), stones (smaller polish passes and component upgrades), and pebbles (icon tweaks, copy fixes, alignment nits) regularly and consistently.
Own the look and feel of Adapt across every surface. Product, marketing site, docs, decks, social, swag, the office.
Build the design system. Not a Figma library that nobody uses — a real, code-backed system that the engineering team (and coding agents) reaches for by default, and that lets us move faster as we grow.
Sit directly alongside our early customers and the many ahead to understand their pain points using Adapt and feed those into proposals and shipped design work.
Help write our launch posts, design the visuals that accompany them, and communicate directly with customers about new capabilities and how they should be understood.
Lead by example. Expect mentorship, but bring a strong default to figuring things out yourself — especially the pace of an early-stage startup in a crowded AI market.
Work shoulder-to-shoulder with the team and leadership in San Francisco. We bias toward shipping, together.
Work directly with leadership: your manager, our CTO and co-founder Sean Smith, our CMO Ashley McClelland, and the rest of the leadership team.

Benefits

Competitive compensation strategy including large equity grants for early hires at an early stage in the company's journey
Inclusive healthcare packages (medical, dental, vision)
Top-tier equipment: latest Apple silicon (Mac Studio / MacBook Pro), 5K display, and any peripherals you need to do your best work
Frontier AI access for every engineer and designer: Claude Code, OpenAI, Cursor, Codex, and most importantly unlimited internal use of Adapt itself
Daily catered lunch in our Presidio (San Francisco) office, plus snacks and coffee
A founder-dense, in-person team in one of the most beautiful corners of San Francisco — direct access to the CEO, CTO, and founding eng/design every day
Base salary: $180-220k for the SF Bay Area.
Total comp also includes equity, benefits, and potential bonus or variable pay.
We are committed to fostering and empowering an inclusive community within our organization. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law.
Encourages everyone to apply for our available positions, even if they don't necessarily check every box on the job description.