Founding Product Designer

Effective AI, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible PTO

Competitive salary & equity

Best-in-class health insurance

401k with company match

Learning & development stipend

Catered lunches

Commuter benefits

Home office stipend

Mentorship from founders

Team building events

Company offsites

Job summary

Effective AI, Inc. in San Francisco seeks a Founding Product Designer to shape how non-engineers work with AI agents in insurance workflows, guiding systems from concept to shipped details with customers and engineers.

With 3+ years in product design and a strong portfolio, you will build reusable patterns, prototype with Figma, and collaborate closely with engineering. This hybrid role includes equity and a competitive base salary.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of relevant product design experience with senior-level ownership.
• Strong portfolio showing interaction and visual craft for complex systems.
• Hands-on experience designing or building with AI agents using modern AI tools.
• Able to move quickly from ambiguity to a clear, well-crafted product.
• Collaborates closely with engineering and product; creates patterns for others.

Responsibilities

• Define how non-engineers work with AI agents across complex insurance workflows.
• Turn dense enterprise workflows into simple, coherent product experiences.
• Prototype and ship quickly with engineering using modern AI tools.
• Create reusable interaction patterns and lightweight design-system foundations.

Job description

Founding Product Designer

About Us

Effective AI is building the operating system for insurance.

Insurance teams work across market data, product rules, regulatory filings, pricing models, and disconnected systems. Effective AI brings that work into one source-backed operating view. Our agents help actuarial, product, and underwriting teams research, analyze, draft, and execute, while experts retain judgment, review, and accountability.

We are a 20-person team backed by Lightspeed and Valor, with a product in production and paying customers. Our mission is to help experts do more of the work people depend on.

Here’s what our culture looks like: Life at Effective AI

What You'll Do

As our Founding Product Designer, you will define how non-engineers work with AI agents across complex, high-stakes insurance workflows. This is not a screen-by-screen execution role. You will shape the systems, guardrails, and interaction patterns that make powerful AI clear, controllable, and trustworthy, moving from early product thinking through shipped details with customers, insurance experts, founders, and engineers.

More specifically, you will:

• Turn dense enterprise workflows and complex systems into simple, coherent product experiences by learning directly from customers and insurance experts.

• Design agent experiences that make the system’s plan, progress, evidence, uncertainty, approvals, and recovery clear, and give users the right moments to steer or step in.

• Prototype and ship quickly with engineering, using Figma and modern AI building tools to move from rough ideas to polished, implemented interactions.

• Create reusable interaction patterns and lightweight design-system foundations, including components engineers can use independently, so design quality scales without becoming a bottleneck.

Who You Are

We’re looking for an ambitious product designer with exceptional taste, strong systems thinking, and the range to move quickly from ambiguity to a clear, well-crafted product.

• You have 3+ years of relevant product design experience and are ready to operate with senior-level ownership. A Senior title is not required.

• Your portfolio shows excellent interaction and visual craft, clear personal contribution, and a track record of turning complex systems or multi-step workflows into simple experiences.

• You have hands-on experience designing or building with AI agents and are comfortable using modern AI tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, or equivalent. Shipped work is welcome; serious prototypes, side projects, research, or open-source work also count.

• You move fast without lowering the craft bar, reason from first principles, and can distinguish a behavior or systems problem from a styling problem.

• You collaborate closely with engineering and product, explain decisions clearly, and create patterns that help others make good design decisions without needing you to own every screen.

Helpful, not required

• Experience designing for enterprise or business users, especially in regulated, analytical, or document-heavy domains.

• Comfort with HTML/CSS and contributing to a shared component system such as Storybook.

Role Details

• Location: San Francisco, CA

• Work Model: Hybrid, 3 days in office

• Compensation: The estimated base salary range for this role is $160,000–$240,000, depending on experience and skill set. In addition to base salary, we offer competitive equity and benefits. Final compensation will be determined based on experience, and qualifications.

Benefits:

• Flexible PTO

• Highly competitive salary & meaningful equity

• Best-in-class medical, dental & vision insurance

• 401k with up to a 4% company match

• $1,200 annual learning and development stipend

• Catered lunches

• Commuter benefits for Bay Area employees

• Home office stipend for remote employees

• Mentorship from experienced founders and access to an elite investor network

• Team building events & happy hours

• Company Offsites

Effective AI is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.