Founding Product Designer San Francisco, CA +1

Beaconholdings; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Beacon Software is seeking a Design Lead to transform complex business problems into practical, scalable products that customers rely on. You will embed with portfolio companies, collaborate with operators, designers and engineers from discovery through adoption, and build features that matter across the portfolio.

Expect to own engagements end-to-end, guiding discovery, pilots and deployment. You will face hard problems, maintain direct customer contact, and hold ownership beyond launch,

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.
• Shape the product and the proof. Define bounded pilots, success criteria and stop conditions.
• Lead delivery with partners. Set requirements and priorities with portfolio product and engineering teams.
• Stay through adoption. Test with customers, ensure reliability, organize rollout and training.
• Prove the value. Measure improvements and total cost, with real-world impact.
• Leave the company stronger. Hand off ownership and capture reusable workflows and lessons.

Skills

Product delivery

Product judgment

AI-enabled products

Stakeholder leadership

Risk awareness

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 early, not launch counts or impressive demos.

• You own the agreed engagement alongside portfolio product and engineering teams, respecting their roadmap and ongoing ownership. This is not a production-engineering, sales or permanent-support role. Engineers own implementation and technical reliability; designers own interaction quality and usability. Company owners approve access and rollout and accept business results. You turn those contributions to adoption.

What Good Looks Like

People can complete important work with less friction, understand exactly what the system is doing, and recover quickly when something goes wrong. The experiences you ship earn repeat use. Alongside product and engineering, you will assess your success through measurable improvements in task completion, time saved, or error reduction.

Our Values at Beacon Software

• Humility: We acknowledge that the path to getting to the right answer involves being wrong along the way. We have strong beliefs which are weakly held. We actively seek new ideas and believe we can learn from anyone at any time.

• Honesty: We are truth seeking in our approach to business problems. Business is a repeat game and we believe that human relationships generate alpha. We understand that trust is earned over a lifetime and can be lost in an instant.

• Hunger: We play to win. We hold ourselves to high standards and will not be outworked. We take pride in having a deep sense of responsibility to ourselves, each other, our partners, and our customers. We believe to whom much is given much is expected.

• Horizon: We seek to build a generational software company. This will take decades. We manage our expectations and those of our partners to take advantage of the 8th wonder of the world - compounding growth.

How We Use AI in Our Hiring Process: To ensure transparency, we want candidates to know that Beacon Software uses Artificial Intelligence and AI-enabled tools to assist with screening, reviewing, organizing and highlighting profiles and applications that match the key requirements for each role.

AI does not make hiring decisions: Every application is reviewed by a member of our team, and all decisions throughout the process are made for by humans. We use all ideas and fairness.