Founding Product & Brand Design

Stealth Startup; New York (NY); On-site; USD 100,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Stealth Startup seeks its founding designer to shape design direction across product dashboard, brand, and website. You’ll own tools, systems, and standards and work closely with founders and engineering from exploration to shipped product. Coding experience is not required.

You’ll turn complex workflows into clear navigation, build a cohesive design system, and craft visual identity that resonates with developers evaluating the tool.

Qualifications

• Strong visual craft with emphasis on typography and spacing.
• Experience designing dense dashboards with clear UX reasoning.
• Experience extending brand identity across surfaces.
• Experience designing marketing websites for technical audiences.
• Ability to explain technical concepts through layout and copy.
• Design for responsiveness and accessibility, including motion preferences.

Responsibilities

• Design the product dashboard atop the existing design system for all states.
• Translate complex developer workflows into intuitive navigation and flows.
• Develop and apply brand identity across product and website.
• Design marketing website pages with clear value propositions and CTAs.
• Create diagrams and explainers to convey technical concepts.
• Build and maintain a design system with tokens and components.
• Create prototypes showing behavior and transitions.
• Collaborate with users, partners, and engineers; iterate on usability.
• Hand off assets and specs and review results with engineers.
• Propose experiments to improve signups, onboarding, and activation.

Skills

Visual craft

Dashboard UX

Brand identity

Marketing websites

Developer-centric thinking

Responsive design

Accessibility

Tools

Figma

Illustrator

After Effects

WebGPU

Job description

Engineering teams now run many coding agents at once, and all of that work eventually has to come together. We're building a merge queue for that world. It works out how changes across pull requests actually interact, sends agents to resolve these conflicts, and prepares each PR against the code that main is about to become. Teams keep their agents, their Git workflow, and their required checks and reviews, and we coordinate everything in between.

We're early, in stealth, and working closely with our first users and design partners. You'll shape how the product looks, works, and explains itself from the ground up. We'll share more about the company once we're in conversation.

The Role:

As our founding designer, you'll set the design direction for the company and own it across three connected surfaces: our product dashboard, our brand, and our website. The product is deeply technical, and your job is to make it easy to use, distinctive, and clearly valuable to the developers evaluating it. You'll define how we design, not just what we design: the tools, systems, and standards that future designers will build on. You'll work directly with the founders and engineering from early exploration through shipped product. Coding experience is not required.

What you'll do:

• Design the product dashboard building ontop of our existing design system. You'll cover every state, including loading, empty, error, and permission states.
• Turn complex developer workflows into clear navigation, onboarding, and task flows.
• Develop our brand identity: the logo system, typography, color palette, iconography, illustration style, and visual guidelines, applied consistently across the product and website.
• Design our marketing website, including the homepage, product pages, comparison pages, pricing, and campaign landing pages. Each page should be built around a clear value proposition, product demonstrations, proof, answers to objections, and a relevant call to action.
• Make technical ideas visible. Create diagrams and explainers that show technical concepts in an understandable and intuitive manner.
• Build and maintain a design system of tokens, components, variants, and guidelines that keeps the dashboard, website, and brand consistent.
• Create prototypes that communicate behavior, navigation, feedback, and transitions, not just static screens.
• Talk with users and design partners, identify usability problems, and iterate based on what you learn.
• Hand off organized source files, assets, and interaction specs, and review the built result with engineers.
• Propose and evaluate experiments that improve signups, onboarding, and activation.

What we're looking for:

• Excellent visual craft, including typography, spacing, hierarchy, composition, color, and attention to detail.
• Demonstrated experience designing dense application or dashboard interfaces, with clear UX reasoning behind your decisions.
• Experience creating or extending a brand identity across multiple surfaces.
• Experience designing marketing websites, ideally for a technical audience, with an understanding of conversion-focused page structure.
• An understanding of how developers evaluate tools, and the ability to explain technical concepts through page structure, visuals, headlines, and concise interface copy.
• A habit of designing for responsiveness and accessibility, including contrast, keyboard interaction, focus states, and reduced-motion preferences.
• Comfort taking an ambiguous brief from exploration to polished deliverable, setting priorities, and communicating tradeoffs.

Nice to have:

• Motion design skills, including timing, easing, transitions, animated diagrams, and product walkthroughs.
• Rive experience, especially interactive animations built with state machines and inputs.
• Technical illustration.
• AI-assisted creative workflows for exploration, asset creation, and rapid prototyping, without sacrificing visual consistency.
• Working coded prototypes of interactions or visual effects. Production code is not expected.
• 3D, procedural graphics, or an interest in real-time web graphics such as WebGPU and shaders.
• Experience at a developer-tool, infrastructure, or technical SaaS company.
• Evidence of improving a meaningful product outcome, such as signups or onboarding completion.

If you're excited about this role but don't match every point, we'd still like to hear from you.

Tools:

We use Figma as our primary tool. We also use Illustrator or an equivalent for vector and brand work, WebGPU for interactive motion, and After Effects or an equivalent for motion graphics. AI design and prototyping tools are part of our workflow too. Equivalent tools and workflows are welcome.

Compensation and Benefits:

The base salary range for this role is $100,000 - $250,000 per year. This is our good-faith estimate of what we expect to pay at the time of posting. Where an offer falls in the range depends on job-related factors, such as the depth and relevance of your experience and skills.

We are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of any status protected by federal, New York State, or New York City law. That includes actual or perceived race, color, religion or creed, national origin, sex, gender (including gender identity and expression), sexual orientation, age, disability, pregnancy, sexual and reproductive health decisions, marital or partnership status, familial status, caregiver status, immigration or citizenship status, military or veteran status, genetic information or predisposing genetic characteristics, height, weight, arrest or conviction record, credit history, salary history, unemployment status, or status as a victim of domestic violence, sex offenses, or stalking.

We will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records in accordance with the New York City Fair Chance Act and New York State law.