Founding Designer

Cherry; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Meaningful equity

Job summary

Cherry Ventures is hiring a Founding Designer for a pre-seed AI portfolio company. You will own all aspects of design—from brand to product—and shape how the company shows up in the world. You’ll work with founders and engineers to turn ambitious ideas into intuitive experiences.

As the first designer, you’ll define design direction, tone of voice, and how interview agents interact with users. You’ll operate in a fast, high‑agency, AI‑native team and own the design from day one.

Qualifications

• Craft & taste: you personally deliver strong visual craft and thoughtful UX.
• AI-native: you use AI agents day to day, to explore ideas and build functional prototypes.
• Words & agents: you know words and agent interactions shape a product's success as much as pixels.
• Autonomy: you pick a direction on ambiguous problems and make progress, bringing others along.
• Research: you invent on users' behalf and learn from them directly; research is a daily habit.

Responsibilities

• Explore: brainstorm with AI tools and agents to brainstorm, explore ideas, and bring best ones to life.
• Prototype: take meaningful ideas from inception to a testable prototype within days.
• Research: invent on users' behalf, learn directly from them, and make research part of daily practice.
• Ship: collaborate with engineers to bring it to life in production, using what you learn to improve it.

Job description

Cherry Ventures is hiring on behalf of a pre-seed AI portfolio company.

The Role

We're hiring our Founding Designer, the first design hire, owning all of design: brand, product, and how the company shows up in the world.

The company helps fast-moving teams learn from real people, fast. A customer (or their agent) describes what they want to learn; an AI-powered system, with a human in the loop, learns from real people and turns those conversations into insights the customer can act on.

Design is how the product feels: to builders, to their agents, and to every person interviewed. You'll own all of it.

The Mandate

Full ownership of design, from day one. You'll own all aspects of design for the brand and the product, and also for how the company shows up in the world.

You'll work closely with the founders and engineers to turn ambitious ideas into thoughtful, intuitive experiences. You'll define the strategic design direction, the tone of voice, and even how the interview agent makes human participants feel.

You'll have full responsibility to bring all this to life, as part of a world‑class team of high‑agency, AI‑native builders.

One person, four roles:

• Designer — visual craft and UX, end to end.
• Researcher — learns from users, every day.
• AI-native builder — builds workflows and prototypes with agents.
• Independent operator — runs alone, brings others along.

Built for scale: how you work now becomes how design works as the team grows.

How You'll Work

Work in fast cycles, from early exploration through to production.

• Explore: use AI tools and agents to brainstorm, explore ideas, and bring the best ones to life.
• Prototype: take meaningful ideas from inception to a testable prototype within days.
• Research: invent on users' behalf, learn directly from them, and make research part of your daily practice.
• Ship: collaborate with engineers to bring it to life in production, using what you learn to improve it.

Who You Are

A designer with taste, who builds like an engineer.

• Craft & taste: you personally deliver strong visual craft and thoughtful UX, with an eye for detail.
• AI-native: you use AI agents day to day, to explore ideas and build functional prototypes.
• AI experiences: you've designed around AI, and can explain how it changed the way people use a product.
• Words & agents: you know words and agent interactions shape a product's success as much as pixels.
• Autonomy: you pick a direction on ambiguous problems and make progress, bringing others along.
• Research: you invent on users' behalf and learn from them directly; research is a daily habit.
• Judgment: you know when to refine an idea, and when to test it.
• Pace: you enjoy the pace and responsibility of a small team of high‑agency, AI‑native builders.

Why Join Now

• A blank canvas at the moment it matters most: as the first designer, you'll set the brand, product, and voice from first principles. Every decision compounds as the company grows.
• In an AI-native product, design is the product: words, agent interactions, and how participants feel are the experience. Few roles let you design for builders, their agents, and the people being interviewed, all at once.
• A new category, built with people who've done it at scale: alongside founders who've shipped AI at significant scale, you'll learn fast and shape where it goes.

The Practicalities

• Where: London. The core team is all based in London.
• Together: ~2 days a week in person; the team meets at least once a week.
• Remote: ±2 hours of UK for exceptional candidates with proven remote impact.
• Package: Competitive salary plus meaningful equity.