Product Engineer

Founding Product Designer

Employment Type: Full-time, Independent Contractor (Contract-to-Hire / Founding Team)

Work Model: Remote

Work Hours: US Eastern Standard Time (EST) alignment

Role Overview

We are seeking a strategic, high-agency Founding Product Designer to shape the user experience, visual direction, and operational workflows of our enterprise software platform from the ground up.

This is not an execution-only mockup seat. Working directly with our founders, engineering leads, and enterprise clients, you will audit our existing product architecture, challenge assumptions, and synthesize complex operational data into intuitive, human-centered UI/UX systems. You will combine high-taste visual design with strategic product thinking—evaluating current platform capabilities and confidently presenting multiple design paths to simplify complex logistics, asset management, and analytics workflows.

Key Responsibilities

1. Product & UX Strategy

• System Auditing & Usability Reviews: Evaluate existing product experiences and live features—identifying usability bottlenecks, structural friction, and high-impact areas for UX elevation.
• Strategic Design Recommendations: Translate complex business and customer requirements into multiple design concepts, presenting trade-offs and recommending clear execution paths to leadership.
• Founder Collaboration: Partner with founders to shape the long-term product roadmap, define core interaction standards, and translate business vision into enterprise-grade user journeys.

2. End-to-End User Experience & Systems Design

• Workflow Simplification: Design end-to-end user flows, wireframes, high-fidelity mockups, and interactive prototypes that make data-heavy dashboards, manufacturing/logistics workflows, and analytics easy to navigate.
• Design System Governance: Build, maintain, and scale a modular, component-driven design system in Figma to ensure visual consistency and seamless engineering handoffs.
• Front-End Engineering Alignment: Partner closely with software engineers to validate component feasibility, review implementations, and establish reusable interaction patterns.

3. Founding Culture & Customer Insights

• User Advocacy: Bring customer insights and operational context into product discussions, serving as a fierce advocate for user clarity and operational efficiency.
• Culture & Standards: Help establish the company's foundational design principles, design systems, and product culture within a fast-moving startup environment.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• Professional Experience: 4+ years of hands-on experience in Product Design, UI/UX Design, or Interaction Design, supported by a portfolio demonstrating end-to-end product builds.
• Figma Mastery: Advanced proficiency building design systems, interactive prototypes, auto-layout components, and detailed interaction patterns inside Figma.
• UX & Information Architecture: Deep expertise in simplifying complex operational workflows, data visualization, user journeys, and enterprise software architecture.
• Engineering Collaboration: Proven experience working directly alongside front-end engineers to ensure design implementation matches production specs.
• Strategic Communication: Outstanding verbal and written English communication skills; able to articulate design rationale clearly to non-design founders and engineering leads.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience designing B2B SaaS, enterprise software, data-heavy dashboards, analytics platforms, or AI-enabled operational tools.
• Early-stage startup or founding-team experience, with comfort navigating ambiguity and building structure from scratch.
• Direct experience conducting user interviews, usability testing, and customer discovery sessions.
• Exposure to logistics, supply chain, asset management, manufacturing, or sustainability domains.

Success Metrics (KPIs)

• System Adoption & Scalability: Delivering a comprehensive, componentized Figma design system adopted across engineering builds.
• Workflow Simplification: Reducing friction metrics and click depth across complex data and operational user flows.
• Product Velocity: Rapidly moving feature concepts from initial discovery to high-fidelity, developer-ready execution.