Founding Product Designer

P-1 AI•United States,

2d•$200,000 - $275,000•Hybrid

About The Position

P-1 AI is seeking a Founding Product Designer to define the product experience for a new category of AI agents that participate in real engineering work. The ideal candidate will have experience designing products for technical users in complex domains, turning ambiguity into clear and powerful product experiences. This role involves working directly with the CEO, AI engineers, product engineers, and design partners to shape the core interaction patterns, product architecture, and visual language of P-1 AI. The company's design principles include functionalism, density, explicitness, anti-minimalism, verbosity over opacity, and a timeless, unfashionable aesthetic. The goal is to build an AI engineer agent named Archie that can understand goals, ask clarifying questions, use engineering tools, show its work, collaborate with humans, and earn trust in high-stakes industrial workflows, ultimately aiming to build engineering ASI.

Requirements

Designed products for technical users where the underlying domain was complex, ambiguous, and/or expert-driven.
Portfolio artifact where you personally turned a confusing workflow into a product experience that feels clear and powerful.
Strong at interaction design, product architecture, prototyping, and visual craft.
Comfortable working from first principles when there is no existing product category to copy.
Like spending time with users, especially when the feedback is messy, technical, or contradictory.
Can move between low-fidelity sketches, polished mockups, written product thinking, and implementation details without losing momentum.

Nice To Haves

Designed products that made complex technical work feel simple, fast, and almost obvious
Want to invent the interaction model for AI agents that do real engineering work, not chatbots that answer questions
Equally comfortable talking to mechanical engineers, watching users struggle, and turning ambiguity into beautiful product surfaces
Want to be the first product designer at a fast-moving Series A company building toward engineering ASI

Responsibilities

Design the core user experience for Archie, including how engineers assign work, review results, inspect reasoning, compare alternatives, and share work back and forth with an AI teammate.
Turn messy design-partner conversations into product flows, wireframes, prototypes, and crisp product decisions.
Sit with users as they try Archie on real engineering tasks, watch where they get confused or skeptical, and redesign the experience until it clicks.
Create prototypes that make abstract AI capabilities concrete for customers, investors, recruits, and internal teams.
Build P-1 AI’s product design system, including interaction patterns, information hierarchy, visual language, and reusable components.
Partner with frontend and AI engineers to ship product quickly, then tighten the experience through repeated cycles of user feedback.
Help decide what Archie should expose, what it should hide, when it should ask for help, and how it should communicate uncertainty in high-trust engineering workflows.