Product Designer (Discovery-Led)

About the company

We're two founders building Sam, an AI support system for the humans in athletics. Sam lives on an athlete's phone, available whenever they need a minute to reflect and sort something out.

"Sam kind of recommended that I go talk to somebody new, and I kind of talked to him, and now we're best friends, and we hang out a lot." — NCAA athlete

"I have made very clear boundaries with a couple people... Sam gave me tips, gave me recommendations. Before practice, I was like, hey, I don't like these jokes you're making." — NCAA athlete, a self-described conflict-avoider

"I'm a better person. All around." — NCAA athlete, asked the biggest benefit of Sam

"I ended up sharing things with my coach that I had been hiding from them." — NCAA athlete

We've shown what Sam can do when athletes stay with them. A few weeks in, they've made a new friend, set the boundary they'd been dreading, and changed the major they'd been agonizing over. The harder thing, the thing we're hiring you to help us with, is earning that time back. Every week, every day, through real value and a great user experience.

What you'd actually do

Own Sam's product design end-to-end. The user experience, conversation flows, onboarding, daily rhythms, and the moments that matter most to the people using it. This includes finding the new features that deliver even greater value.

In your first 90 days, you'd ship three or four significant design improvements based on what you see athletes and coaches actually doing. Real, in production, learning from real users. You'd sit in on interviews with our beta groups, close enough to the research that your design decisions are grounded in what athletes and coaches are telling us, even though you won't run the program yourself.

You'd sharpen Sam's identity by defining how the product feels, sounds, and behaves. Athletes and coaches are trusting Sam with significant parts of their lives, and the experience should match that weight. And you'd build the muscle on this team for thinking in flows and interactions, not just features. Right now, the founders hold that between engineering decisions. We need someone who lives in it.

Who you are

You've shipped products people actually use, not because a manager told them to, but because they chose to. You care about craft, and you care more about whether anyone's life is better because of what you designed. Your portfolio has at least one example where you can point to a specific design decision and say, here's why retention improved.

It matters a lot that you've lived something close to this. Athlete, coach, or someone who's done serious work for the people in athletics. You know the heavy legs before a 6 am workout. The locker-room silence after a loss you can't shake. The feeling of falling short after giving everything. You want to build for the people you used to be.

Concretely, you can design end-to-end in Figma at a level that Engineering can build from directly, including interaction details, edge cases, and states, not just the happy path. You can hold both the visual and the systemic, since Sam needs a consistent identity across hundreds of small moments, not a beautiful homepage. You can sit in user interviews and let what you hear change what you design. You prototype fast and rough when we're testing an idea, polished when we're shipping it, and you know which is which. And you hold opinions loosely, because we change our minds when the evidence changes.

We're building for athletes' and coaches' relationships, identities, wellness, and performance. That's work for humans that requires real nuance and care. The right person takes that seriously and lets it shape every decision, without becoming so cautious they can't ship.

Who this isn't for

If you want a finished brief, this isn't it. You'll be shaping a lot of the work yourself.

If you're a pure visual designer who hands off and moves on, this isn't it. You'll be living with what you ship, watching how athletes and coaches use it, and changing it when it's wrong.

If you're more energized by design systems than by a specific athlete's reaction to a specific screen, this isn't it.

The logistics

Paid contract, full-time, at a competitive rate we'll discuss on the first call. The first three months are a trial period. Remote, Michigan-based. If both sides want to keep going after 3 months, the role becomes founding product designer with equity.

You get paid good money to find out whether you actually want to work here, instead of guessing from a few hours of conversation. We get to make a founding hire by watching someone work, instead of guessing from a portfolio.

The team

Two cofounders. Jeff is a neuroscientist and psychologist turned serial entrepreneur. Robin is a former D1 athlete turned full-stack engineer. We bonded at Jeff's first company (NeuroTrainer) over a shared conviction: the humans in elite athletics deserve the same innovative support off the field that they get on the performance side.

Day to day, Jeff handles research, customer relationships, fundraising, and science-backed content. Robin leads engineering and builds Sam's technical infrastructure. He's been doing the design work too, which is why we're hiring.