Head of Design

Head Of Design

Photon gives patients ownership of prescriptions. Our platform enables clinicians to send prescriptions to patients via text, which saves them time by allowing their patients to shop between pharmacies. The vision is to help consumers save money by increasing transparency.

Who We're Looking For

We're looking for a Head of Design to define how Photon feels, works, and shows up in the world. This is the senior design leadership role for someone who can operate across product design, brand, creative direction, and storytelling. You'll own the experience quality across our patient, provider, pharmacy, partner, and internal surfaces, while shaping the visual language that makes Photon feel trustworthy, modern, and unmistakably itself. Photon sits in a messy, high-stakes part of healthcare. Prescriptions are confusing for patients, operationally painful for providers, and fragmented across pharmacies, payers, and partners. Your job is to make that complexity feel simple. You'll turn infrastructure into experiences people understand, trust, and want to use. You'll work closely with the CEO, Product, Engineering, Commercial, and Ops to decide what we build, how it should work, and how we explain it. You'll be expected to raise the bar on craft while staying close to the business: shipping product, supporting sales, building systems, and helping the company communicate a big vision clearly. If you have exceptional taste, strong product instincts, and the range to move from patient UX to enterprise storytelling without losing clarity, this role is for you.

Core Responsibilities

• Own Photon's design function across product, brand, marketing, and customer-facing storytelling.
• Define and evolve the design system for patient, provider, pharmacy, partner, and internal workflows.
• Lead product design for core experiences, including patient prescription routing, provider prescribing workflows, partner integrations, and marketplace surfaces.
• Translate complex healthcare infrastructure into simple, intuitive, high-trust user experiences.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to shape roadmap decisions, scope work, and make tradeoffs between speed, craft, and complexity.
• Create the visual and narrative system that helps Photon explain itself to customers, partners, investors, and candidates.
• Raise the bar on product quality, interaction patterns, UX writing, visual design, and end-to-end customer experience.
• Build lightweight, scalable design processes that help a fast-moving team make better decisions without adding unnecessary drag.
• Support commercial work with sharp sales collateral, demos, diagrams, launch materials, and customer-facing narratives.
• Hire and develop designers as the function grows, while staying hands-on enough to set the standard yourself.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of design experience across product design, brand, or creative roles, with meaningful ownership of a product or design function.
• Exceptional product design craft, with a portfolio showing simple solutions to complex workflows.
• Strong visual taste and the ability to create coherent systems across product, web, sales collateral, and brand expression.
• Experience designing for B2B, healthcare, fintech, marketplaces, infrastructure, or other complex systems.
• Ability to move between strategy and execution: you can define the north star, then make the pixels, words, and flows better.
• Strong systems thinking, including experience building or evolving design systems.
• Comfort working directly with engineers and product leads in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment.
• Excellent communication skills, especially the ability to explain design decisions to technical, commercial, and executive audiences.
• High ownership and low ego; you can raise the bar without slowing the company down.
• Experience using AI tools to speed up exploration, prototyping, production, or creative workflows.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience as the first or most senior design hire at an early or growth-stage startup.
• Experience designing patient, provider, clinical, or health system workflows.
• Experience with enterprise sales, customer storytelling, or technical product marketing.
• Ability to create diagrams, demos, prototypes, or motion/video assets that make complex products easier to understand.
• Experience hiring or managing designers, agencies, freelancers, or creative partners.
• Familiarity with accessibility, privacy, compliance, or trust-sensitive design environments.

Why Join Us

Photon is reimagining how prescriptions move through the healthcare system—making it simpler, faster, and more transparent for patients, providers, and pharmacies alike. You'll:

• Own design at a company where experience is core to the product, not decoration.
• Shape how millions of patients understand and manage their prescriptions.
• Work on a problem almost everyone you know has experienced, and help fix a system that's broken in ways most people just accept.
• Build the design language for a company moving from product to platform to marketplace.
• Partner directly with a small, high-performing team across product, engineering, commercial, and operations.
• Be pushed—these are hard problems, and we expect a lot—but the growth and impact that come with it are real.
• Join a team that gives a shit—about the work, about each other, and about doing things the right way. High trust, high standards, and we actually like spending time together.

Our Values

Be a Pizza Rat – We're ambitious subway dwellers. It's our slice and we're not letting go. Make Rice – We don't prepare fish until we've mastered rice. Quality is in details. Put it in Orbit – We know success happens well after lift-off. The rocket isn't our mission. ‍ Seek Buried Treasure – We're digging in unexpected places. Our adventure has meaning. Grow in Darkness – We're thriving amidst forest decay. Our day in the sun will come.

Pay Transparency

The estimated base salary for this role is $190,000 – $240,000 USD annually. Actual compensation will depend on skills, qualifications, and experience, and includes equity and benefits. At our stage, we place significant value on equity as part of total compensation.