Founding Designer

Hone; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health and dental insurance

Maternity and parental support

Relocation support

Job summary

Hone is building AI engines that own outcomes, not tasks, and we’re seeking a designer to own the UX for agentic, multiplayer systems. You’ll shape product design end to end, craft the design system, and build Hone’s brand and marketing site with a focus on clarity and impact.

You’ll collaborate with engineers to ship to real users, iterating after launch, and help define the interface vocabulary for asynchronous, autonomous engines.

Qualifications

• A strong portfolio of shipped product work with precise visual and interaction craft.
• Time at a fast-growing startup.
• You’ve built design from scratch: a design system, a brand, or both.
• You’ve shipped with engineers to real users and kept iterating after launch.
• You make complex, dense systems simple without hiding what matters.
• You use AI tools every day to prototype and ship, and still own every detail.
• You design for fun because you genuinely care about the craft.

Responsibilities

• Engine onboarding, from an empty workspace to an engine that understands its job.
• One view of an engine that zooms from its full structure down to a single live decision.
• Autonomy that people dial up over time, legibly and reversibly, from approving every action to bounded autonomy.
• Corrections that land at the right level: one item, one person’s preferences, the team default, or the engine itself.
• Memory and permission views at org and personal level.
• How an engine asks for judgment: when to interrupt, whom, and with how much context.

Skills

Strong portfolio

Startup experience

Design system

Engineer collaboration

Complex to simple

AI prototyping

Craft focus

Job description

Hone builds AI that owns outcomes, not tasks: agentic systems that work towards goals over weeks and months, deploy themselves, and improve over time.

About Hone

Models keep getting smarter, but outside of coding most organizations can’t absorb that intelligence, and the gap between model capability and the value derived from it keeps widening. The reasons are many, from human incentives to org design, but at the core we think it’s a technology problem. Hone builds engines: AI systems that you hand a goal, like “keep the recruiting pipeline healthy.” An engine builds itself, maintains its own agents and code, pulls in people when it needs judgment, and learns from every correction. Leading AI companies and global enterprises already run engines across funnel optimization, procurement, deal sourcing, asset management, financial risk, and product and customer delivery. We measure ourselves by the real-world economic impact our engines create, not benchmark scores. We’re ex-founders and early engineers from Cognition, Mercor, Ramp, Jane Street, Decagon, Brex, and Harvey, backed by Benchmark and Index Ventures.

The Role

Engines work with many people for weeks or months and keep acting while no one is watching. There is no established interface vocabulary for that yet. As our first designer, you’ll own the UX paradigms for agentic systems that are multiplayer, asynchronous and autonomous: product design end to end, the design system, and Hone’s brand and marketing site.

What You’ll Work On

• Engine onboarding, from an empty workspace to an engine that understands its job.

• One view of an engine that zooms from its full structure down to a single live decision.

• Autonomy that people dial up over time, legibly and reversibly, from approving every action to bounded autonomy.

• Corrections that land at the right level: one item, one person’s preferences, the team default, or the engine itself.

• Memory and permission views at org and personal level.

• How an engine asks for judgment: when to interrupt, whom, and with how much context.

Requirements

• A strong portfolio of shipped product work with precise visual and interaction craft

• Time at a fast-growing startup

• You’ve built design from scratch: a design system, a brand, or both

• You’ve shipped with engineers to real users and kept iterating after launch

• You make complex, dense systems simple without hiding what matters

• You use AI tools every day to prototype and ship, and still own every detail

• You design for fun because you genuinely care about the craft

Nice to Have

• You code: you prototype or ship production UI and design-system code yourself

• You’ve designed agent, ML or developer-facing products

How We Hire

1. Intro call.

2. Portfolio deep dive.

3. Design deep dive.

4. One-day onsite in San Francisco.

5. References.

6. Offer.

Logistics

• Location: San Francisco, in person, Sunday to Friday.

• Compensation: Competitive salary + meaningful equity.

• Visa: We sponsor visas and support you through the immigration process.

• Benefits: Health and dental insurance, maternity and parental support, and relocation support.