Founding Product Designer

Sage Care; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Sage Care in Palo Alto is seeking its first full-time designer to shape what we build and how it works. You’ll own design across our user‑facing products end to end, from research and problem framing through spec, launch and iteration, focusing on dense, high‑stakes workflows in clinical operations.

You’ll lead research directly with staff, craft polished interfaces, and partner with founders, product and engineers to set the product vision and roadmap.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of product design experience.
• Experience designing complex products across multiple companies, ideally B2B SaaS, systems-heavy, or operational internal tools, with ownership from problem definition through launch.
• A strong portfolio showing product thinking, polished UI craft, the reasoning behind the work, and the results it drove.
• Experience designing both product interfaces and brand and marketing materials.
• Strong research instincts and the ability to run your own user sessions.
• Fluency in Figma for interface design and prototyping, and comfort with the broader design toolkit for brand and marketing work.
• Comfort using current AI tools like Cursor, GPT, and Claude as part of your practice, and judgment about where they fall short.
• Excellent collaboration and communication in a cross-functional, fast-moving team.

Responsibilities

• Shape the direction of our products, grounded in deep knowledge of the people who use them.
• Own design across our user-facing products end to end, from research and problem framing through spec, launch and iteration.
• Lead research directly. Sit with referral coordinators and phone staff, learn how they actually work, and turn what you find into product direction.
• Craft polished, trustworthy interfaces that hold up under the density and pressure of real clinical operations.
• Partner with the founders, product, and engineers to set product vision and roadmap.
• Prototype quickly, in code or whatever communicates the idea best, so the team can react, align, and build the right thing faster.
• As the founding designer, you’ll own brand and marketing too: sales one-pagers, pitch and partner decks, and the website.
• Ship high-quality work fast in an early-stage, often ambiguous environment.

Skills

Product design

UI/UX design

User research

Cross-functional collaboration

Figma

AI tools

Brand and marketing design

Tools

Figma

Cursor

GPT

Claude

Job description

About Sage Care

Sage Care is a fast-growing, early-stage healthcare startup founded by exceptional leaders from Apple, Uber, Carbon Health and backed by top-tier venture capital (General Catalyst, Chelsea Clinton). With a strong customer pipeline, Sage Care is transforming healthcare by simplifying care navigation. Our platform makes it easier for patients to find the right doctor, helps providers focus on those who need them most, and ensures faster access to care – delivering better care and stronger economic outcomes at scale through harnessing the latest AI innovations. Building on our successful collaborations with health systems across the U.S., we have expanded internationally to the MENA region. We are now partnering with health systems there to deploy our AI-powered care navigation platform.

About Design at Sage

You would be our first full-time designer. That means you shape what we build and how it works, setting the standard for design's role in the product as the team grows. Our work shapes how hospital staff experience their jobs: whether a referral coordinator processes their queue with less friction, whether the people answering phones trust what the copilot tells them. These are dense, high-stakes workflows, and the conventions for AI-assisted care navigation do not exist yet. That means staying close to real users, prototyping quickly, and getting comfortable with ambiguity. We care about craft, the details that make something feel polished and trustworthy. We also ship fast and learn from real use rather than waiting for perfection.

What You'll Do

• Shape the direction of our products, grounded in deep knowledge of the people who use them.
• Own design across our user-facing products end to end, from research and problem framing through spec, launch and iteration.
• Lead research directly. Sit with referral coordinators and phone staff, learn how they actually work, and turn what you find into product direction.
• Craft polished, trustworthy interfaces that hold up under the density and pressure of real clinical operations.
• Partner with the founders, product, and engineers to set product vision and roadmap.
• Prototype quickly, in code or whatever communicates the idea best, so the team can react, align, and build the right thing faster.
• As the founding designer, you’ll own brand and marketing too: sales one-pagers, pitch and partner decks, and the website.
• Ship high-quality work fast in an early-stage, often ambiguous environment.

In the first 1–2 months you’ll likely work on

• Referral matching: design the tool referral coordinators use to process incoming referrals and schedule patients with the right provider, turning fragmented rules and provider availability into a workflow that can be moved through quickly.
• Call logs workflow: turn thousands of patient conversations into something a team can read, trust, and act on.
• Analytics dashboards: consolidate fragmented usage data into a single source of truth, giving internal teams and health system partners clear visibility into system health and performance.
• Brand and website: shape how Sage shows up to the health systems we want to win, from sales one-pagers to the site itself.

Required

• 6+ years of product design experience.
• Experience designing complex products across multiple companies, ideally B2B SaaS, systems-heavy, or operational internal tools, with ownership from problem definition through launch.
• A strong portfolio showing product thinking, polished UI craft, the reasoning behind the work, and the results it drove.
• Experience designing both product interfaces and brand and marketing materials.
• Strong research instincts and the ability to run your own user sessions.
• Fluency in Figma for interface design and prototyping, and comfort with the broader design toolkit for brand and marketing work.
• Comfort using current AI tools like Cursor, GPT, and Claude as part of your practice, and judgment about where they fall short.
• Excellent collaboration and communication in a cross-functional, fast-moving team.

Nice-to-have

• Previous experience building from 0 to 1 at an early-stage startup – you know how to balance shipping fast with building for the long term.

What Success Looks Like

• You lead with research, not pixels. You’d rather understand the person and the problem before starting a prototype, run your own sessions, ask uncomfortable questions, and let what you learn change the design.
• You’re a real product partner. You’re opinionated about what to build and why, not just how it looks, and you hold your own with the CTO and engineers.
• Your craft is the real thing. Your work is polished and considered, with a point of view. Composition, typography, and layout get the same attention as the logic behind them – and you know that in clinical software, details build trust.
• You ship fast and iterate. You’d rather get something in front of users this week than polish it for a month, and you know when to ship and when to keep going.
• You’re AI-native, not AI-reliant. You already use AI tools to explore and move faster, and you know which parts of the work, the research, judgment, and craft, still have to be yours.
• You raise the bar around you. You bring standards and patterns from where you’ve been and make the people you work with better.
• You’re excited about being in an IC role today. You want to focus on your own design impact for now, not manage a team from day one. As the company grows, there will absolutely be opportunities to lead and manage our design team, if that’s of interest.