Founding Product Designer

Founding Product Designer

Private asset market infrastructure

Reports to CEO

Location NYC

Stage Series A/B

We build infrastructure for the private asset market — one of the fastest-growing segments in global finance. Our platform manages complex, multi-party financial workflows across the full lifetime of private asset transactions for leading financial institutions. The product is live, generating revenue, and operating at scale.

The Design Problem

• Product is moving from a screen-first build model, where the underlying system is designed first and the interface follows.
• Today's product is fully deterministic, human-driven screens. You'd help define, from scratch, what this platform looks like as AI becomes a first-class part of it — AI agents as a new type of participant alongside human users, and AI as a new interaction modality for human users themselves.
• Workflows are tied to assets that can live 5–7 years, resurfacing repeatedly at different cadences over that lifetime, with multiple parties holding different views and permissions each time.
• Clients regularly bring new deal and asset structures the platform hasn't seen before, so the product has to accommodate structural variation it can't fully anticipate.
• Permissioning is layered — participants often have their own downstream stakeholders who need visibility into a subset of the same information.
• You should have a point of view on how AI is reshaping what a "product" is — some interfaces that mainly surface or summarize data are being displaced by AI accessing that data directly, while the same underlying data, exposed well, can become a richer product than a screen ever was. Being able to tell the difference between a workflow that needs a great interface and one that's becoming infrastructure other things build on is core to this role.

What You'll Do

• Build and lead the product design function from the ground up —structure, process, craft bar.
• Define how design works in a build model where the underlying system comes first and the interface follows, including a design-to-engineering process suited to that model.
• Own the design approach for a platform that has to support both deterministic and AI-native interactions at once, including how the two coexist without the product feeling like two products bolted together.
• Make the platform-level calls on design systems and reusable patterns — where variation should live in the system versus the interface — as the product extends across new workflows and asset structures.
• Partner closely and technically with Engineering on platform-level design decisions and systems; partner with Product on commercial translation and sequencing as Product moves toward owning commercial outcomes directly.
• Represent design in leadership conversations and roadmap decisions.
• Mentor and grow the design team you build, and help evolve how design, product, and engineering work together.

What You Should Have

• Real, hands-on experience designing AI-native interaction patterns — not just a point of view on them. Able to point to specific shipped work.
• Strong systems thinking — comfortable making design-system and platform-level decisions, not just screen-level ones.
• Experience partnering closely and technically with Engineering, including on system architecture and design-to-engineering process.
• An outstanding portfolio demonstrating both craft (typography, interaction, visual design) and product judgment.
• Experience hiring, coaching, and raising the bar for a design team in a fast-growing environment.
• Excellent written, verbal, and storytelling skills.

Success Looks Like

• The design team is built, leveled up, and has a real seat in roadmap and platform decisions.
• There's a durable design approach for the deterministic/AI-native split that the team can apply without you in the room.
• Design systems and patterns hold up as the platform extends into new workflows and structures.