Founding Designer

Concourse Tech Inc.; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Concourse is seeking a Founding Designer to define the design language for its public sector platform. You will own the foundation layer of the interface, including tokens, primitives, components, motion, and patterns, enabling frontline PMs to assemble agency solutions across diverse workflows.

You will ship a production-ready design library and front-end code, collaborating with engineers and AI tooling to solve complex government processes. This role is NYC-based and requires in-person work.

Qualifications

• A portfolio showing end-to-end shipping under real client pressure with constraints.
• Hands-on experience using AI coding tools as part of daily workflow.
• High-agency, high-velocity mindset with strong work ethic.
• 5+ years of product design experience, including startups.
• A design system you built or significantly shaped that works across multiple products.

Responsibilities

• Define Concourse design language and conventions for products.
• Create flexible, reusable components for complex workflows.
• Own the design library covering tokens, primitives, components, motion, and docs.
• Ship production front-end code with AI agents alongside engineers.
• Address multi-approver reviews, complex fee schedules, deadlines, and legacy data models.
• Collaborate with non-technical stakeholders to translate workflows into interfaces.
• Maintain pixel-level standards while respecting system-wide design.
• Work in-person in Flatiron, NYC, with US work authorization.

Skills

Product design

AI tooling

Design systems

Job description

Concourse is an AI-native company building software for the public sector. We’re growing rapidly, with more than 100 federal, state, and local partners. We’re based in New York, and we’re looking for people who are enthusiastic about using AI to get more done.

Open positions

Roles we’re hiring for.

Founding Designer

Location

New York City

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

On-site

Department

Product

Compensation

• $120K – $160K

Why this role

Concourse is building the operating system for State and Local governments. Our platform is a configurable approach to tackling fragmented government data and workflows and turning them into smooth operations for public servants and the constituents they serve. As a Concourse Product Designer, you're not just designing screens for a single product, you're defining the design language of the public sector.

You will own the foundational layer of the interface: the tokens, primitives, components, motion, and patterns that everything above them is built on. Your role is to empower our Forward-Deployed PMs who sit alongside city and county teams, understand their specific workflows, and assemble each agency's solution. A bail management system for a county courthouse. The IT Helpdesk for a school district. A water utility operations dashboard. A financial aid application. Your job is to make sure that no matter the problem space, using the product is intuitive and feels unmistakably like Concourse.

You're working on the design questions that make every deployment possible: how to model any government process in a set of primitives constrained enough for a non-engineer to assemble, how to make a fourteen-step statutory review feel simple to someone filling it out on a phone during their lunch break, how to hold a pixel standard across hundreds of deployments with different audiences and mandates.

These are hard, unsolved problems. Nobody has designed public services at this scale with these tools. The person who gets it right sets what government software feels like for the next decade.

What You'll Do

Define the design language of Concourse: the conventions every product inherits, from casing and form patterns to error and empty states, motion, and authentication flows

Create flexible components FDPMs can leverage, configurable enough to model many workflows and constrained enough that a non-engineer can assemble a product without breaking the standard

Own the design library every Concourse product is built on, from tokens and primitives through components, motion, templates, and documentation

Ship all of it as production front-end code, built with AI agents alongside engineers, rather than as Figma files for somebody else to interpret

Find elegant solutions for complicated government workflows: multi-approver reviews, conditional fee schedules, statutory deadlines, and legacy data models that were never designed to be seen by the public

What We're Looking For

A portfolio: what have you shipped end-to-end, under real client pressure, with real constraints?

Hands-on experience using AI coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Factory, etc.) as a core part of your daily workflow, with a strong sense of what AI can and will be able to do

High-agency, high-velocity mindset with an exceptional work ethic

5+ years of product design experience, including early-stage startup experience

A design system you've built or substantially shaped that held up across more than one product; you design for the case you haven't seen yet

Comfort in extreme ambiguity; a project often starts with a statute, a screenshot of a 20-year-old system, and a partner who can't fully articulate what they need

Pixel-level standards alongside systems thinking

Comfort with code as your deliverable; Figma can be a thinking tool here, but it is not the output

Strong relationship-building skills with non-technical stakeholders; you can sit with a county clerk or a school IT director and turn their workflow into an interface

US citizen or work authorization

Willing to work in-person in Flatiron, NYC (5 days/week)

Compensation Range: $120K - $160K