Founding Product / Web Designer New York City

About this role

Founding Product / Web Designer

Engineering & Product

New York City

Full time

About Autumn

Autumn makes best-in-class software and digital marketing accessible to independent hotels, B&Bs, resorts, and more. We're passionate about supporting this underserved segment of hoteliers so these unique properties can continue to thrive for generations to come.

We're founded by repeat entrepreneurs with deep hotel experience and backed by Tier 1 venture capital firms, having raised the largest seed round in hotel tech history. We're a tight-knit team based in New York City, working in person out of our waterfront office in Williamsburg.

We're building an AI-native platform that helps independent hoteliers grow revenue, streamline workflows, and deliver better guest experiences.

About the Role

We're hiring a Product Designer with exceptional visual taste and strong product judgment to join our founding team.

You'll shape both the software hotel operators use and the experiences their guests see. Your work will span Autumn's product UI, our own website, and reusable website and email templates that hotels use to attract and engage guests.

We want someone who can make a complex product workflow feel simple and create a beautiful, compelling website that makes someone want to book a stay. Strong interaction design and exceptional visual craft are equally important in this role.

This is a highly hands-on role. You'll work directly with founders, engineers, and hotel operators to understand problems, explore solutions, prototype quickly, and stay involved through implementation. You'll also bring websites to life using code or modern website-building tools.

The hotel-facing web work is about creating flexible templates and systems that serve many properties, rather than designing each hotel's website individually.

What You'll Do

• Own product experiences end to end. Take work from problem definition and user research through information architecture, interaction design, visual design, prototyping, implementation, and iteration.
• Make complex workflows intuitive. Turn hospitality workflows across revenue, marketing, guest management, and operations into clear interfaces that busy hotel operators can use confidently.
• Design thoughtful AI-native experiences. Help users delegate work, review outputs, maintain control, and recover when systems fail.
• Design and build Autumn's website. Translate our positioning and product story into a distinctive, compelling experience.
• Create reusable hotel website templates. Design layouts, components, and customization options that work beautifully across different properties, brands, imagery, and content.
• Create reusable email templates. Help hotels communicate with prospective and returning guests through clear, visually compelling marketing and guest communications.
• Build coherent design systems. Develop components, patterns, and visual foundations across product UI, websites, and email, adapting them to each audience and medium.
• Work directly with customers and engineers. Understand real needs, make thoughtful tradeoffs, and ensure the shipped experience reflects the design intent.
• Learn from shipped work. Use customer feedback and performance data to improve usability, engagement, and conversion.

Our Ideal Candidate

• Has exceptional taste and cares deeply about typography, hierarchy, composition, imagery, interaction, and the details that make an experience feel considered.
• Is equally comfortable designing useful product interfaces and compelling consumer-facing websites.
• Can simplify complicated workflows without losing functionality that users need.
• Thinks beyond a polished screen or page to consider navigation, responsive behavior, loading, empty states, errors, and accessibility.
• Understands how visual storytelling, trust, and clear calls to action help people make decisions.
• Designs systems that hold up across different brands, content, and real-world use.
• Moves quickly from an ambiguous problem to a testable idea, then refines the details through implementation.
• Is curious about customers, receptive to feedback, and able to explain the reasoning behind design decisions.
• Uses AI tools thoughtfully to accelerate exploration, prototyping, and execution while maintaining a high quality bar.

Requirements

We don't require formal credentials. We do require:

• Excellent product design fundamentals. Strong information architecture, interaction design, visual design, prototyping, and systems thinking.
• Exceptional visual craft. A portfolio that demonstrates a distinctive eye and consistently strong execution.
• Evidence of both product and web design. Show us a shipped product experience and a compelling website or consumer-facing experience. Be clear about what you personally owned.
• Hands-on website building. You can bring responsive websites to life using code or modern website-building tools and demonstrate work you've shipped.
• End-to-end ownership. You can understand a customer or business problem, develop a point of view, explore solutions, ship, and learn from the result.
• Technical collaboration. You work effectively with engineers, understand practical constraints, and stay involved in implementation to preserve usability and craft.
• Clear communication. You can explain design decisions to technical and non-technical teammates and respond well to direct feedback.

Nice to Have

• Experience in consumer products, hospitality, travel, ecommerce, marketplaces, or other areas where brand, trust, and conversion matter.
• Experience designing B2B products, workflow tools, or operational software.
• Experience building configurable website templates, themes, or multi-brand design systems.
• Experience designing and implementing responsive HTML email.
• Front-end development skills, including HTML, CSS, React, or TypeScript.
• Experience designing AI-native products or agentic workflows.
• Startup experience with significant ownership and limited process.

We welcome candidates from B2C, B2B, agency, and independent backgrounds. We care more about the quality of your work and your ability to solve problems across product and web than the category you've worked in.

Traits That Thrive at Autumn

• High agency and self-direction: Acts without waiting for detailed requirements or instructions.
• Small-team intensity: Comfortable working closely with a small, high-output team.
• Pragmatic problem solving: Challenges assumptions and finds simpler paths forward.
• Quality-driven execution: Maintains high standards for usability, visual craft, and the shipped experience.
• Low ego and accountability: Takes ownership of outcomes and cares more about reaching the right answer than defending the first idea.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary and equity.
• Beautiful office in Williamsburg, New York.
• Stipend for lunch and fitness, and top-tier medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• A front-row seat to building an AI-native vertical SaaS company.
• The opportunity to shape both Autumn's product and the digital experiences independent hotels offer their guests.

Location

This role is four to five days a week in person in New York City, and candidates must be authorized to work in the United States.