Founding Designer

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

Job summary

Phonely, a San Francisco–based enterprise voice AI company, seeks a senior design hire to shape brand, website, and the customer‑facing product all at once.

You should have a portfolio with polished brand and product work, several years of design experience, and a track record building design systems. You’ll partner with engineers to take ideas from concept to shipped outcomes in an AI‑driven product.

Qualifications

• Polished brand and product work in portfolio.
• Several years of design experience.
• Track record of building design systems.

Responsibilities

• Design across brand, website, and customer-facing product.
• Collaborate closely with engineers to ship projects end-to-end.
• Develop and extend design systems for scalable front-end implementations.

Skills

Brand design

Product design

Design systems

Engineer collaboration

Tools

Claude AI

Job description

This is the first design hire, so the job covers brand, website, and the customer-facing product all at once. A strong candidate has several years of design experience, a portfolio that shows polished brand and product work, and a track record of building design systems. They also work closely with engineers and take projects from first idea to shipped result.

How it fits the AI era

AI tools are part of the daily workflow here, including turning design standards into code and speeding up implementation. The product itself is voice AI, so a big design challenge is making complex call workflows easy for customers to understand and trust. Taste, judgment, and the ability to defend a design choice stay human.

How it builds AI experience

The role offers hands‑on practice using AI coding tools like Claude to apply design rules in real frontend code, plus experience designing screens for voice agents that handle live customer calls. To build this beforehand, try creating a small design system and using an AI assistant to turn it into working components. Studying how phone‑based AI products present call flows and results also helps.

Worth showing

• Brand and visual identity work
• Design system built from scratch
• Shipping alongside frontend engineers
• AI-assisted frontend implementation

This is our own read, written from the employer's posting and the company's Spotlight. The employer's posting is the source of truth for the role.

About Phonely

Enterprise conversational voice AI agents automating business telephony and inbound customer support, per the company.