Head of Design

The Role

We’re hiring our first design leader to own how people experience our brand and products, starting with Iris, our climate risk platform. Iris turns engineering-grade hazard and damage modeling into decisions made by executives, operations teams, finance leaders, and consultants, most of whom are not risk modelers. The core of this role is translation: taking outputs that are technically defensible and making them understandable, trustworthy, and actionable for the people who need to act on them.

Much of your time will go to the Iris experience: how complex results unfold for different roles, how confidence and uncertainty are communicated, how recommendations connect to action, and how we design the journey from understanding risk to actually reducing it. Scores with no confidence behind them no longer survive scrutiny in this industry; design that earns trust is part of the product, not decoration. User experience, interaction, and visual design all work together here, in service of one thing: convincing and enabling people to act on the insights.

The brand is the thread that ties it all together. The way risk reads in a report, a one-pager, or a conference booth should be the same language a customer meets inside the product. You’ll build that unified visual and narrative system across our website, collateral, case studies, and templates: the machinery that lets a small company feel bigger than its footprint and gives our go-to-market real leverage. One seat holds the product and the brand because a customer’s external impression and their in-product experience should reinforce each other.

About You

You’re a designer who has grown into a leader without losing the craft. You’ve led the design of complex, data-heavy products, ideally while also owning the brand around them, and you know why keeping the two coherent matters. You think in systems: design languages, component libraries, templates that others can run with. But you got there by being excellent at the details first.

You’re drawn to complexity on behalf of the people who have to navigate it: turning dense, technical, high-stakes data into insights a non-expert can understand, defend, and act on. You want to work close to the engineers, experts, and data scientists making the product decisions, not in a studio at arm’s length from them.

You’re comfortable being the most senior design voice in the room at a small company: setting direction, giving other designers a clear system to execute within, and being accountable for the result. And the mission matters to you, not as a slogan but as the reason to spend your next years on this problem.

What You’ll Do

• Own design direction across Class 3: one coherent system from product to brand
• Build the experiences that will drive adaptation and resilience decisions at scale: understanding risk, comparing options, and acting on recommendations
• Set the experience architecture across our products, starting with Iris: role‑specific flows, progressive disclosure of complex results, narrative outputs, onboarding, and reporting
• Design how trust shows up across all our experiences: provenance, uncertainty, and defensibility made visible
• Build and document our brand identity: visual language, voice, and the templates and collateral that carry it, including website, one‑pagers, case studies, conference materials, newsletters, and event presence
• Equip our go‑to‑market: strong leave‑behind, follow‑up materials, and campaign assets that make every customer conversation land better
• Work directly with the founding team, Product, and Marketing; design at Class 3 sits at the table, not downstream of it
• Use AI‑enabled design and prototyping workflows as everyday instruments, so iteration speed is not limited by headcount

What We’re Looking For

• 8+ years in design with real leadership scope, spanning user experience, interaction, and visual design
• Experience designing complex, data‑heavy products that turn technical material into actionable insights for non‑expert decision‑makers, in climate, risk, science, finance, or an adjacent domain
• A portfolio that shows the range: shipped product and identity systems, with the thinking behind why each works
• Fluency in modern design tooling (Figma, component‑based systems) and genuine curiosity about AI‑assisted design workflows
• Strong writer: narrative and microcopy are part of the system, not someone else’s job
• Experience directing other designers or external partners without doing all the execution yourself
• US‑based; able to be in NYC or SF regularly

First 90 Days

• Absorb the domain: the product, the models behind it, the customers, and how they make decisions
• Audit everything a customer touches (product, brand, site, collateral)
• Put a v1 of the unified design in place
• Develop and initiate user research and customer feedback validation loop
• Frame the design direction for the next iteration of the adaptation and decision journey in Iris, and ship it with the rest of our product development team
• Ship collateral for our upcoming events and customer‑facing materials that visibly raises the bar

Why Join Us

We’re building something that matters. Natural disasters already cost tens of billions of dollars every year, and the toll on our physical infrastructure keeps rising. At Class 3, design is not packaging: it’s how engineering‑grade intelligence becomes decisions that protect real assets and real communities.

You’ll be our first design leader, setting the experiential and visual foundation for everything that comes after. Our customers already make meaningful decisions based on our insights; your work shapes how those decisions get made. The rare part is the combination: a genuinely hard translation problem, a mission with tangible impact, and a foundation few designers get to set.

• Competitive salary and equity
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k)
• Flexible PTO
• Flexible, remote‑first work environment

Class 3 Technologies is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to building an inclusive environment for all employees, regardless of race, gender, age, religion, identity, or experience.