Product Designer

About the role

We're hiring our founding designer to join the small, high-output product and engineering teams s is an end-to-end product design role. You'll help define how companies build, run, and govern their central agent with Adapt, from customer problem through exploration, implementation, launch, and learning from real use.

We are particularly seeking a designer who cares deeply about taste, craft, and shipping, with the agency to turn ambiguous problems into clear, high-quality product experiences. You should be comfortable building a design system and prototyping or shipping in code when that's the fastest way to make progress.

Years aren't all equal (startup years are like dog years, as an example) and they're not the best predictor of success. That being said, you probably exhibit most of these characteristics:

• 4-7+ years of professional product design experience, ideally in AI, developer tools, infrastructure, enterprise software, or data products
• 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 shipped product work, complex systems made understandable, and end-to-end ownership from the customer problem through implementation
• 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

As the founding designer at Adapt, you own product design end-to-end, from the customer Slack thread through exploration, implementation, shipping, and learning from real use. Your job isn't done until customers love what you built and how it works. As we scale, you'll own and grow the design function. Concretely, you're responsible for:

• High-quality execution. This is the central responsibility of any designer. You design, prototype, and ship product surfaces, flows, and system patterns that feel clear, coherent, and right.
• Shipping frequently. You ship boulders like core product surfaces and design-system foundations, stones like smaller polish passes and component upgrades, and pebbles like copy fixes, icon tweaks, and alignment improvements regularly and consistently.
• Owning the product experience. You set and hold the bar across Adapt's core product surfaces in Slack and web, including setup, integrations, agent behavior, trust, and control.
• Building 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.
• Customer discovery. You'll 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.
• Strong internal and external communication. You work directly with customers to understand what they need and make the product easier to understand and use.
• Set a high bar. 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.
• Collaboration. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with the team and leadership in San Francisco. We bias toward shipping, together.

You'll also work directly with leadership: your manager ( me, Dustin), our CTO and…