Founding Designer

Cardboard; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Founding-team equity

Unlimited tokens

Tools & equipment budget

Job summary

Cardboard is building the future of storytelling and video editing with a fast-moving, small team. As founding designer, you will shape both the product’s look and its behavior, ensuring flows feel intuitive and cohesive.

You’ll think product-first, push back when something doesn’t serve users, and meticulously plan user paths before shipping components. You’ll collaborate closely with founders, engineering, and growth, and you’ll build a design system that scales as the product evolves.

Qualifications

• As the founding designer, you shape how the product looks and works.
• You'll think product-first and push back when a flow isn't user-friendly.
• You'll own user flows before a component ships and build cohesion.

Responsibilities

• Own product design end-to-end: flows, UI, prototypes, and system integration.
• Advocate for the user in every room like a PM does.
• Collaborate with founders, engineering, and growth teams.
• Build and evolve a design system.
• Create something people love and use daily.

Skills

Taste

End-to-end ownership

PM mindset

AI-curious

Figma expert

Micro-interactions

Design systems

Freelancer coordination

Tools

Figma

Rive

Spline

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.

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

You'd be surrounded by people who are absurdly good at what they do. One started coding at 11 and shipped an app with 6M+ downloads in high school. 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. Apart from that you'd get:

• Competitive salary and founding-team equity.
• 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.

Share

• Your portfolio and resume.
• Your favorite product and one sentence on why.
• One piece of work that you're proud of.
• Optional: if you'd like, record and send us a quick video : )