Founding Product Designer

About this role

Founding Product Designer

Senior, systems-minded. Own design execution for the Living Intelligence Platform.

San Francisco Bay AreaHybrid, in-person by defaultSeniorMeaningful founding equity + salary

Design systemsComplex B2BAccessibility

The mission

Make collaboration work between people, machines, and AI.

Twenty years ago organizations coordinated people. Today they coordinate people and software. Tomorrow they will coordinate people, AI agents, machines, and humanoids. Nothing in the modern stack was built for that. Organizations do not fail because people lack intelligence; they fail because that intelligence is not coordinated, and coordination failures already cost the economy roughly $2 trillion a year.

Ignizia is building the operating layer for human-AI-machine coordination. This is the unsolved layer of the AI transition: independent research keeps finding that capable AI agents lose much of their capability the moment they have to work together, and that the hardest problems in enterprise AI are organizational, not technical. Coordination cannot be downloaded. It has to be captured and shaped from how a real organization actually works, and whoever holds that teaming-context layer holds something no one else can import.

So we start at ground zero: small and mid-size manufacturing, the most coordination-dependent, least digitized work there is. We are live with a design partner, a 60-person luxury footwear manufacturer, where the platform is being shaped view by view against real operations. We are founder-led, early stage, and hiring our founding team.

Why this role is unusual

You will not be starting from a blank page. Ignizia already has an unusually complete product definition: a 33-view interactive product canvas simulating the platform 30 days into a live pilot, a canonical naming and information-architecture brief, established navigation and accessibility patterns, and an engineering-grade relational data model. The founder holds the product vision and has set the frame.

Your job is to be a partner within that frame: take the design bottleneck off the founder, turn the canvas into a production-grade design system, and make every screen excellent. This seat is not a second product visionary, and it is deliberately senior; we are not hiring a junior designer for it.

The stakes of the craft are unusual too. The surfaces you design are where a worker meets an AI teammate for the first time and decides whether to trust it. Trust is the precondition, not a feature: if the product ever reads as surveillance, everything upstream of it collapses. Very few design roles carry that weight; this one does.

What you will do

• Own design execution across the platform: take the Day-30 canvas from high-fidelity mockup to production-ready design, screen by screen.
• Build and own the design system: tokens, components, patterns, and documentation the engineers can build against without waiting on you.
• Uphold and extend the standing patterns (five-studio information architecture, in-app tab navigation, dyslexia-friendly design by default) rather than relitigating them; propose better implementations side by side when you see one.
• Design data-dense, trust-sensitive surfaces: provenance, confidence, consent, and privacy states are first-class UI in this product, not afterthoughts.
• Design the role-evolution experience: every worker can see how their own role grows as AI is integrated. A career GPS for the AI transition, never a scoreboard.
• Partner daily with the founder and the founding engineers; ship every week.
• Raise the bar on craft: interaction detail, empty states, edge cases, accessibility.

What we are looking for

• Roughly six or more years of product design, with significant time on complex, data-dense B2B or enterprise products.
• You have built and maintained a design system from scratch at least once, and can show it.
• A systems thinker: you notice seams, inconsistencies, and patterns that want to exist.
• Fluent working close to code: HTML/CSS literacy, comfortable reviewing what actually shipped.
• Accessibility as a practice, not a checkbox.
• Low ego, high craft: you do your best work executing brilliantly inside a strong product frame.

How we will interview

We will hand you the actual product canvas and the data model and ask you to find the seams: where the design system wants to break, what is inconsistent, and what you would systematize first. If that sounds like fun rather than a trap, apply.

What we offer

• A problem worth a decade: the coordination layer of the AI transition, started where it is hardest and most real.
• Meaningful founding equity, plus a salary range shared early in the process.
• A founding seat with real ownership: every pixel that ships is yours.
• A live design partner, not a hypothetical market: your work ships against a real factory and real people from week one.
• San Francisco Bay Area, hybrid with in-person time as the default. Occasional travel to the design partner is possible, never required.

Interested in this role?

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