Senior Product Designer

The one design hire. End-to-end owner of how verified truth looks, feels, and behaves - a builder whose leverage is taste and judgment, not throughput.

Product.ai is the verified truth layer for shopping - the intelligence that tells you what's actually true about a product, including when not to buy. Profitable. Bootstrapped. No outside investors. No board. 20 people outbuilding companies 10× our size.

Strong people find us and keep finding us - they apply over months and years, because the field moves fast and the exact profile we need moves with it.

Why This Role Exists

Design here has been held to a founder-level bar from day one - because when the product is trust, the interface is the product. That bar now needs its full-time owner.

This is the one design hire: end-to-end ownership of every surface a consumer touches, with a direct line to the founder and nothing between your judgment and what ships. You sit at the decision table, model where the company is going, and design ahead of it.

It's a builder-owner seat, and that's the point. You own the work from strategy to pixels yourself - strategy reaches the product through your judgment, not through a brief someone else writes - and your leverage is taste: you decide what to make and how you'll know it landed. You can take an idea from "what should a verdict feel like when the evidence is mixed?" to a rendered, working component the same day.

The System You'll Need to Model

• Decision-shaped truth. The core interface unit isn't a chat reply or a product page - it's a verdict: what's true, the evidence behind it, how confident we are, and when the honest answer is "don't buy." Users reshape the question - change a constraint, a budget, a skin type - and watch the verdict change in front of them. The verdicts come from Axiomatic Intelligence (ADP), our patent-pending verification research method. Designing calibrated trust - never overselling certainty, never burying it - is the craft.
• A design system that is law, not a guideline. Your tokens and components are consumed directly by the agents that generate our UI, so ambiguity in the system becomes defects in the product. The system has to be precise enough to govern machine output, not just guide human designers - and a visual mockup gates every build, fired before engineering writes production code, enforced by the system rather than by goodwill.
• Multi-surface coherence as an architecture problem. One componentized system has to hold across web, browser extension, chat apps, and mobile - surfaces with different interaction physics that must read as unmistakably one product. Coherence from a single source is engineering here, not a brand deck.
• A company that redesigns itself continuously. Strategy, surfaces, and systems move weekly, and agents do the moving - they answer their own questions against our shared knowledge base instead of waiting on you. You model where the product is heading and design ahead of it, working from signal rather than briefs.

If reading that energizes you, keep going. If it feels overwhelming or underspecified, this isn't the right fit.

What You Will Own

• The design system as governing law. More than a component library with usage notes - a system precise enough that agents generate inside it on every surface. You own its precision, its evolution, and the gates that keep generated output within it.
• The mockup-before-code gate. Every build passes a design gate before engineering: the visual mockup is approved before production code is written. The gate is enforced, not aspirational, and you own what passes. Most of this job is good calls in the gray area - your taste is the standard the gate applies.
• Design exploration at machine scale. You'll direct agents to render dozens of real, rendered directions where a traditional process produces three - then decide which live and which die. Compute is effectively unlimited and steered by return, not cost: the expensive thing is a redo cycle, never tokens.
• The consumer experience bar. End-to-end quality on everything a consumer touches - web, extension, chat, mobile - each owned as a falsifiable outcome with an evidence test a stranger could run. It's the part any company would need, here with the whole surface area and yours alone to carry.

Who You Are

You independently form working models of complex systems, notice where your model is wrong, and update fast. You start from enough signal to reason from first principles, and you move before scope is perfectly defined. You have taste and strong opinions and can defend both in writing, because clear writing is evidence of clear thought.

You move between product strategy and shipped pixels without getting stuck at either altitude, and high agency is your default setting. You've shipped live consumer products - real URLs people use, not concept work - and built a design system from scratch that others, or agents, then built with. You've probably designed for at least two of web, extension, chat, and mobile. We care about the artifact and the reasoning far more than where you did it.

You treat agents as leverage you direct and verify - render many options, keep the ones that clear your bar, kill the rest. And you can do this job by hand: you can draw the screen, build the system, and judge the result yourself. That mastery is exactly what lets you trust the verdict when agents do the volume.

Who this isn't for. This role is wrong if your portfolio is stronger than your shipping record, or if the draw is building and running a design team - there's no team to manage. It's wrong if you need a PM to turn strategy into briefs, or if you only operate at one altitude - pure systems thinker or pure visual stylist. It's wrong if you'd rather be admired for the mockup than accountable for what shipped. And it's wrong if your design is whatever the tool handed back and you couldn't say why it's right, or if you're comfortable letting agents grade their own work - here you own the verdict. You'll be happiest if you want the whole problem: the system, the taste, and the call.

How We Evaluate

We don't run traditional design interviews.

Written artifact. Send something you've written - a design-system doc, a product teardown, a written spec for something that shipped - alongside a system you built and the hardest failure you personally diagnosed in it, and what you changed. Writing quality and depth of ownership are our first filter.

Video screen. Brief and async: 5-6 questions, about 15 minutes, whenever works. We want to see how you think, not how you present.

Calls with company stakeholders. Short conversations with key members of the team.

Conversation with the founder. How you model systems, where your taste comes from, how you push back.

Paid work trial. 1-2 weeks at $1,500/day, doing real design work in our real environment - live surfaces, the actual design system, real agent-driven production. We watch how you ground yourself, whether you write the spec before the build, how you verify what agents produce, and whether your self-assessment is honest. We both learn more in two weeks of real work than in ten hours of interviews.

Compensation & Ownership

Total first-year comp: $300,000 - $400,000 (base + equity + profit sharing).

Base: $225,000 - $300,000. Top of market for design.

Profits Interest Units (PIUs) - Class B Membership Interests at $0 strike, real ownership day one, capital-gains treatment; annual pro-rata profit sharing from free cash flow; annual tender liquidity; 100% family premium coverage; effectively unlimited token budget, steered by ROI, never capped.

Based in Los Angeles, California. Hybrid, with flexibility. For the right builder, we're open to remote.
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