Founding Product Designer

Founding Product Designer at almedia. About the role Almedia is a fast-scaling, bootstrapped venture on a trajectory to become Germany's next unicorn, currently serving a massive audience of over 70 million users through its marketing platform. We are searching for a Founding Product Designer to take ownership of the design vision and execution for this high-scale consumer product. This position offers a rare opportunity to join at a foundational stage where your decisions will directly shape the core user experience and visual language of the platform. You will operate with significant autonomy, bridging the gap between raw user needs and polished, shippable interfaces. The role demands a practitioner who thrives in ambiguity and is driven by the challenge of designing for millions.

Key facts Location: Berlin Engagement: Full-time, 5 days per week in-office Compensation: €90K - €120K plus equity Team: Product

What you'll do

• Steward the complete design lifecycle, guiding concepts from early-stage discovery and problem definition through to high-fidelity execution and final handoff to engineering teams.
• Architect and produce intuitive, visually compelling user interfaces optimized for a mobile-first context, ensuring consistency and usability across the platform's extensive surface area.
• Embed deeply with engineering, product management, and data science counterparts to guarantee that design solutions are technically feasible, performant, and aligned with core business metrics.
• Design and execute qualitative usability studies and quantitative user research initiatives, leveraging behavioral data analysis to validate hypotheses and iterate on design decisions with evidence.
• Facilitate rigorous design critique sessions and present strategic rationale to diverse stakeholders, driving alignment and securing buy-in for the product direction.
• Contribute actively to long-term product strategy and roadmap planning, using design thinking to identify new opportunities and influence high-level business objectives.
• Build, maintain, and evolve a cohesive design system that accelerates development velocity while maintaining brand integrity and accessibility standards across all touchpoints.
• Translate complex user flows and information architecture challenges into simple, elegant interaction patterns that reduce cognitive load for a diverse global user base.
• Collaborate on the definition and tracking of key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the impact of design changes on user engagement and retention.
• Rapidly prototype concepts ranging from low-fidelity wireframes to interactive high-fidelity mockups to test assumptions and communicate vision effectively.
• Advocate for the end-user in every product discussion, balancing user advocacy with business constraints and technical limitations.
• Mentor and uplift the broader product team on design best practices, accessibility guidelines, and user-centered methodologies as the organization scales.

Requirements

• A minimum of five years of professional experience specifically within mobile-first product design environments, demonstrating a track record of shipping consumer-facing applications at scale.
• A comprehensive portfolio showcasing exceptional proficiency in both visual interface design (UI) and user experience architecture (UX), with clear case studies demonstrating problem-solving depth.
• Strong working knowledge of front-end implementation technologies, specifically HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, enabling effective collaboration with developers and realistic assessment of technical feasibility.
• Proven ability to synthesize quantitative analytics and qualitative research findings into actionable design iterations that move core product metrics.
• Superior communication and presentation skills, with the capacity to articulate complex design rationale to both technical and non-technical audiences across cross-functional teams.
• Demonstrated experience operating in fast-paced, high-growth startup or scale-up environments where priorities shift rapidly and autonomy is expected.
• Expert-level proficiency in modern design tooling (Figma preferred) including advanced prototyping, component libraries, and multiplayer collaboration workflows.
• A solid grasp of accessibility standards (WCAG) and inclusive design principles, ensuring the product remains usable by the widest possible audience.

Nice to have

• Practical experience with motion design and micro-interactions, utilizing tools like After Effects, Lottie, or ProtoPie to bring static interfaces to life.
• Prior work designing gamified mechanics, reward systems, or engagement loops that drive user retention and habit formation.
• Background in designing for marketplace, social, or creator-economy platforms where network effects and user-generated content are central.
• Familiarity with A/B testing frameworks and experimentation culture to statistically validate design variants.
• Experience contributing to or managing a design system from inception through adoption across multiple product verticals.
• Previous founding or early-employee experience at a venture-backed or bootstrapped startup, understanding the "zero-to-one" product development phase.

Skills & tools

• Visual Design & Brand Identity
• Interaction Design & Prototyping
• User Research & Usability Testing
• Data Analysis & Metrics-Driven Design
• Information Architecture & User Flows
• Design Systems & Component Libraries
• HTML, CSS, JavaScript (Technical Literacy)
• Figma (Expert)
• Accessibility (WCAG) Compliance
• Cross-functional Collaboration & Stakeholder Management

Practical notes

This position is strictly on-site, requiring presence at the Berlin office five days a week to foster the high-bandwidth collaboration necessary for a founding team.

The compensation package includes a competitive base salary ranging from €90,000 to €120,000 annually, supplemented by a meaningful equity grant reflecting the founding nature of the role. Benefits are comprehensive: every employee receives equity ownership, a monthly public transport subsidy, catered daily breakfast and lunch, dedicated support for German language learning, and a fully covered Urban Sports Club membership for fitness and wellness. Visa sponsorship and relocation support are available for exceptional candidates relocating from abroad.

The interview process typically involves a portfolio review, a practical design exercise, and conversations with the founding team and key engineering leads.