Founding Designer

You will own the full design surface of the company. The marketing site, the product, the review queue, the internal tools. Our design register is editorial, restrained, and honest. We do not decorate. We do not use motion to suggest capability. We do not ship interfaces that feel more confident than the system behind them. In this role you will be designing for licensed professionals who will read every word on the screen. That is a different audience from the general consumer software audience. It rewards density, precision, and quiet competence, and it punishes anything that looks like marketing dressed up as product. You will be the only designer for some time. That means you are responsible for taste as much as for execution, and it means the craft standard you bring is the standard the company keeps. Who you’ll work with You will work directly with the founder and with engineering. You will also work with the practitioners who use Wren on real buildings, because their judgement about whether the product respects their work is the single most important signal we have. What you’ll do In your first six months you will take ownership of the review queue, which is where most of our licensed users spend their time, and you will bring it to a standard where an architect would be comfortable using it in front of a client. You will set the typographic system, the rules, the density, the way a draft filing and its citations appear on screen. You will write the internal design documentation that lets the rest of the team ship work without needing to ask you to approve every screen. Beyond the queue, you will shape the marketing surface and the public research surface so they read as a single institution rather than three disconnected sites. You will own the voice of the product in copy, because a founding designer at this kind of company is responsible for language as much as for layout. Expect to write. What we’re looking for Eight or more years of product design, with work in your portfolio that an editor would recognize as editorial and that an engineer would recognize as correctly built. You have designed inside a domain where accuracy matters more than delight. You write. You have shipped systems rather than screens. In character, we want someone whose first instinct is restraint. Someone who can look at a page and remove three elements before adding one. Someone for whom "institutional" is a compliment, not a constraint. If your portfolio is primarily consumer apps with high motion and high color, this will not be the right fit. Nice to have A background in editorial design, print, or architecture. Comfort working directly in the codebase with engineers, even lightly. Compensation and benefits Senior founding-designer compensation, early-stage equity on a standard four-year schedule, full health and dental, 401(k) with match, five weeks of paid time off, and an office in lower Manhattan. NYC-based. This is a role that benefits from being in the room with the team and the users. #J-18808-Ljbffr Jobleads-US