Founding Designer

Cardboard; California (MO); On-site; USD 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and equity

Relocation support

Unlimited tokens for resources

Healthy budget for tools

Job summary

Cardboard, located in California, is seeking a founding designer passionate about video storytelling. The role involves ownership of product design, working closely with the team to enhance user interactions, and developing a design system.

The ideal candidate must have expertise in Figma, a strong sense of design, and experience in advocating for users. The position offers competitive salary, equity opportunities, and relocation support.

Qualifications

• Expertise in Figma and design systems.
• Experience in product design from end to end.
• Ability to advocate for user experience.

Responsibilities

• Own product design from flows to UI.
• Collaborate with founders and engineering.
• Build a cohesive design system.

Skills

UI Design

Prototyping

Figma

Micro-interactions

Job description

About

• We're building the future of storytelling and video editing.
• We're a small team that moves fast and builds things we're proud of.
• We care obsessively about taste: in design, in product, in every detail.
• We're solving these hard problems.
• We're backed by a Tier-1 global fund, YC, and founders of billion dollar companies.

Cardboard is the agentic video editor. It actually watches your footage, so it can search across tens of gigs, pull the right clips, sync to the beat, and source everything else (music, graphics, sfx, etc.) it needs. The final cut comes out in your brand's language, and all of this happens inside the browser.

You'd be surrounded by people who are absurdly good at what they do. One started coding at 11 and shipped 6M+ downloads. One got into CS engineering at 14 and has been working on distributed systems for 8+ years. One's an ex-founder who took a company to 1.2M users and $300M+ in transactions. That's the team. We're looking for someone who'll raise the bar on the creative side the way we have on the technical and business side.

Design

Video is the most powerful way humans tell stories. It always has been. But creating it today is still painfully hard. Fragmented tools, steep learning curves, and workflows that get in the way of the actual creative work. We're building Cardboard to change that.

As our founding designer, you'll shape not just how the product looks, but how it works. You think product first and push back when something doesn't serve the user, and think through every user flow before a component gets shipped.

In our team, everyone has incredible speed, taste, and care that they put into their work. You'll often see people coming up with micro-interactions nobody asked for and losing sleep over things that feel slightly off by a sheer two pixels. Your job is to accelerate and harness that energy to make sure everything we build feels cohesive and intentional.

You will

• Own product design end to end: flows, UI, prototypes, and everything in between.
• Advocate for the user in every room like a PM does.
• Work closely with founders, engineering, and growth.
• Build a design system.
• Make something people love.

Who you are

• You have taste.
• You own things end-to-end.
• You think like a PM. You notice the extra click, the label doing two jobs, the feature that shipped but isn't really done.
• AI-pilled and restlessly curious. Rive, Spline, Paper, Reve, Claude design, whatever dropped last week, you've already tried it.
• You're a Figma expert. You love micro-interactions. You've probably built parts of a design system, or at least felt the pain of not having one.
• Resourceful. When you need an illustrator, motion designer, or freelancer, you find them and direct them well.
• Bonus: you vibe coded or shipped a side project.

What you get

• Competitive salary and founding-team equity.
• Relocation to SF, including visa / immigration support.
• Unlimited tokens. Use whatever you want, as much as you want.
• A healthy budget for tools, monitors, laptop, and anything you need to do your best work.