Founding Product Designer

Beaconsoftware; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Beacon seeks a Design Lead to turn complex business problems into deployable AI-enabled software. You will embed with portfolio companies, collaborate with operators, designers, and engineers, and own initiatives from discovery through adoption.

Expect ownership beyond launch and the creation of reusable building blocks for others. You will drive outcomes across multiple portfolio teams, delivering measurable improvements and reusable workflows while balancing practicality with innovation.

Qualifications

• Evidence of taking ambiguous product or operational problems through delivery to sustained use and measurable improvement.
• Product judgment: challenge requests, uncover constraints and prioritize.
• Technical fluency in AI-enabled products, integrations, data and evaluations. Inspect behavior and traces, prototype ideas, and discuss reliability, cost and technical tradeoffs with engineers.
• Earn trust with operators and leaders, communicate clearly, and lead cross-functional work without formal authority.
• Sound judgment about risk, permissions, human review and when not to automate.
• Production AI workflow experience is valuable.

Responsibilities

• Find the right problem. Understand customer needs and product priorities with portfolio teams.
• Observe real work, cases, exceptions, decisions, handoffs and constraints.
• Prioritize by value, feasibility, effort, risk and reuse.
• Shape the product and the proof. Agree a bounded pilot, users, baseline, success criteria and stop conditions with the product or business owner.
• Simplify the process before deciding where people, software or agents belong.
• Lead delivery with your partners. Set requirements and priorities.
• Partner with portfolio product and engineering teams, and designers where needed, to test the smallest complete solution, resolve dependencies and adjust scope as you learn.
• Stay through adoption. Test with customers and operators.
• Protect reliability and continuity, define failure and recovery paths, organize rollout and training, and improve through live feedback.
• A launch is a milestone, not the outcome.
• Prove the value. Measure accepted results, recurring use, quality, time and total cost, including review, rework and support.
• Distinguish estimated capacity released from realized savings.
• Recommend whether to improve, expand or stop.
• Leave the company stronger. Hand off to named business and technical owners with their acceptance.
• Capture reusable workflows, evaluation cases and lessons.
• Use Arc, our emerging agents, workflows and applications platform, where it helps the deployment.
• Bring field evidence to Arc and Cortex, which unites business context, data and insights.

Skills

Product judgment

AI-enabled product fluency

Cross-functional leadership

Communication

Problem solving

Tools

Arc platform

Cortex

Job description

Beacon is building the essential technology infrastructure for the everyday economy: the businesses, organizations, and services that make real life work, and that mainstream tech has largely left behind. We acquire, operate, and grow vertical market software companies - niche, founder-built businesses serving industries that are often overlooked and too profitable to ignore.

Our model is simple: we seek out founders who have built their business by spending years understanding their market and prioritizing their customers' specific needs. We buy great businesses, invest in their continued growth, and hold them permanently - accelerating that growth with an AI-native platform built specifically for vertical market software. No mandate to cut, flip, or roll up into something unrecognizable.

We are not a financial firm. We are technology entrepreneurs and operators who believe the most important businesses in the world are already running quietly in industries most people never think about. Our job is to find them, support the people who built them, and make them better.

Beacon is backed by a diverse base of investors, with $550M+ raised to date, including General Catalyst, Lightspeed, D1 Capital, CPMG, the family offices of the founders of Stripe, DoorDash, and Ramp, and evergreen funds built for the long game.

The Role

As the Design Lead, you'll turn difficult business problems into products people depend on. Embed with portfolio companies, work with customers and operators, and partner with designers and engineers from discovery through adoption. One assignment might modernize mission-critical industrial software. Another might transform operations with an AI-powered workflow. You're not there to deliver a presentation and leave. Build something that works, get it into people's hands, and see whether it makes the business better. The impact doesn't stop with one company. Your strongest ideas become building blocks for others. Expect hard problems, direct customer contact, and ownership beyond launch.

Why this role

Own a mission, not just a backlog. Lead a scoped engagement through adoption, measured value and accepted handoff.Build software that matters in the real world.Work across businesses, not just one product surface. Tackle portfolio product upgrades, development acceleration and business operations.Turn one company's breakthrough into an advantage for many. Share reusable software, methods and lessons.Don't install AI everywhere. Find the right intervention and prove it works with product and business owners.

What you will do

Find the right problem. Understand customer needs and product priorities with portfolio teams. Observe real work, cases, exceptions, decisions, handoffs and constraints. Prioritize by value, feasibility, effort, risk and reuse.Shape the product and the proof. Agree a bounded pilot, users, baseline, success criteria and stop conditions with the product or business owner. Simplify the process before deciding where people, software or agents belong.Lead delivery with your partners. Set requirements and priorities. Partner with portfolio product and engineering teams, and designers where needed, to test the smallest complete solution, resolve dependencies and adjust scope as you learn.Stay through adoption. Test with customers and operators. Protect reliability and continuity, define failure and recovery paths, organize rollout and training, and improve through live feedback. A launch is a milestone, not the outcome.Prove the value. Measure accepted results, recurring use, quality, time and total cost, including review, rework and support. Distinguish estimated capacity released from realized savings. Recommend whether to improve, expand or stop.Leave the company stronger. Hand off to named business and technical owners with their acceptance. Capture reusable workflows, evaluation cases and lessons. Use Arc, our emerging agents, workflows and applications platform, where it helps the deployment. Bring field evidence to Arc and Cortex, which unites business context, data and insights.

What you bring

Evidence of taking ambiguous product or operational problems through delivery to sustained use and measurable improvement.Product judgment: challenge requests, uncover constraints and prioritize.Technical fluency in AI-enabled products, integrations, data and evaluations. Inspect behavior and traces, prototype ideas, and discuss reliability, cost and technical tradeoffs with engineers.Earn trust with operators and leaders, communicate clearly, and lead cross-functional work without formal authority.Sound judgment about risk, permissions, human review and when not to automate. Production AI workflow experience is valuable.

How we will judge success

Better customer-facing products and internal workflows that people keep using, verified improvements against a baseline, and receiving teams that operate them independently. We value reuse and stopping weak pilots