Founding Designer

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

Benefits offered by this job

Salary + equity

Unlimited tokens

Tools budget

Laptop provided

Job summary

Nicedesignjobs is seeking a founding designer to shape not only the product’s look but how it works. You will own user flows, interfaces, and prototypes, and you’ll collaborate with founders, engineers, and growth to ensure cohesive experiences.

You bring a keen eye for taste, a PM-like mindset, and a passion for micro-interactions and design systems. The role emphasizes speed, quality, and ownership across the product.

Qualifications

• You are a top-level designer with a strong sense of taste and product thinking.
• You own features end-to-end, from concept to polish.
• You think like a PM and question unnecessary steps.
• You are AI-curious and quick to try new tools.
• You are a Figma expert with experience building systems.
• You enjoy crafting micro-interactions and detail-oriented work.
• You have experience building or contributing to a design system.
• You can lead and direct illustrators or freelancers when needed.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Skills

Figma expert

Design system

PM mindset

UX taste

AI tools curiosity

Micro-interactions

End-to-end ownership

Creative acceleration

Tools

Rive

Spline

Paper

Reve

Claude design

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 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1msvjI0iKo6CG9HMN5Z5vxKpwsU4IxXQl-O4yCwJnq5A/edit?usp=sharing 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.