Design Lead

About The Studio

The Studio is an AI-native venture builder for the Global South, purpose-built to transform high-barrier problems into scalable, investable companies.

Partnering with domain experts & high-agency founders from concept to Series A, it both builds new ventures and re-engineers existing ones for AI-driven growth.

Powered by UTOPIA OS — a modular, adaptive stack tailored to each venture — it compresses the path from concept to Series A to under 24 months.

You’ll be Utopia’s first Design Lead — a hands‑on product design leader who’s AI‑native but human‑centered. You’ll create the design practices and principles that power the Utopia OS platform and help our Entrepreneurs‑in‑Residence (EIRs) and ventures turn insider insight into usable, trustworthy AI products.

You’ll balance AI tools (for speed), AI fluency (designing for probabilistic and agentic systems), and human advantage (taste, judgment, narrative) to deliver products that users actually adopt and investors believe in.

You will form a product trio with the Rapid Prototyping Engineer and the Platform & Infrastructure Engineer to drive continuous discovery and delivery.

Reports to: Studio Directors
Growth path: Head of Design / Chief Design Officer

• Partner with EIR pods from problem framing through to pilot: research, journey mapping, information architecture, flows, wireframes, high‑fidelity UX
• Design for AI interactions (retrieval, agents, evaluations, fail‑safes), turning uncertain model behavior into clear, reliable UX
• Run rapid testing loops with real users and translate findings into product decisions that accelerate pilots and spin‑outs
• Use analytics and behavioral data to validate design choices and guide iteration

• Build the Utopia OS Design System — components, patterns, tokens, and AI‑UX guidelines (prompt patterns, agent handoffs, uncertainty states) that all ventures can use
• Create reusable UI modules for common Studio needs: auth, dashboards, data explorers, workflow builders. This cuts build time across ventures

• Establish an AI‑augmented design workflow (research synthesis, wire framing, content, asset generation) while keeping human judgment in the loop
• Leverage the latest AI‑native tools (Cursor, Figma MCP, rapid prototyping environments) to design, iterate, and ship efficiently
• Coach founders and product engineers on prompt‑as‑design, evaluation thinking, and responsible AI UX patterns
• Set lightweight design QA, accessibility, and privacy standards suitable for enterprise pilots in our regions
• As part of a small, high‑trust team, you’ll also help lay early foundations for Research Ops and Design System governance — coordinating user sessions, keeping insights reusable across ventures, and ensuring design components evolve with each product cycle.
• These systems will start scrappy and manual, but are meant to scale as Utopia’s venture portfolio grows.

• Work with the Marketing Lead on venture launch assets and product narratives when design credibility is critical (screens, visuals, product shots)
• Support the creation of marketing and brand assets to ensure design coherence across product and communication touchpoints
• Partner with leadership to prioritize design resources across co‑build and value‑add tracks, and codify learnings back into Utopia OS
• Co‑lead discovery rituals with the product trio (weekly user sessions, prototype reviews, and decision records) to keep design, engineering, and venture goals aligned.
• We operate as a compact, AI‑native core team — covering product, design, and engineering end‑to‑end.
• Each of us contributes to early foundations in areas like evaluation, data, research, and security, ensuring the platform scales responsibly without added layers or headcount.

• Faster venture cycles: Your design system and patterns reduce time from concept to pilot, contributing to our KPIs on concepts developed and proofs‑of‑concept.
• Higher spin‑out quality: Pilots ship with clear, credible UX and safety patterns — raising…