Founding Designer (Web & Growth)

Job Description

Job Description

• Location: Remote. US, UK or Europe; you'll need at least four working hours overlapping Mountain Time. The range below is for US-based candidates and is adjusted by location elsewhere.

• Reports to: Growth lead, with regular meetings with the executive team for brand work.

About Breathe for Change

Breathe for Change is building the category of Human Intelligence in Education to address the crises of educator stress and burnout, student mental health, and AI disruption. Our accredited higher-education program, a Master of Science in Education in Transformative Teaching & Learning awarded by William Jewell College and accredited by the Higher Learning Commission, equips educators with the human skills they and their students need most to thrive. More than 20,000 educators in every U.S. state have come through our programs. We reach teachers through TeacherCon, our free three-day online event, through paid social, email and a podcast, and we enroll them through honest conversations with our Educator Development Counselors.

The role

You'll be our first design hire. You'll own how Breathe for Change looks and works everywhere a prospective student meets us, and you'll make it yourself. The heart of it is two things: making a complicated thing legible (a 30-credit, three-semester master's and a five-layer Human Intelligence framework, explained visually, in a sequence a tired teacher can follow in one scroll), and making every surface convert and easy to test.

This is a product-design role pointed at marketing surfaces. You design in Figma, you build what you design (Webflow, Framer or code, with Claude Code as your pair), and you read the numbers afterward. Direction comes from our growth lead and our exec team; the craft, the system and the shipped work come from you. There is a mountain of hands-on design to do, and we'd rather hire one person who can do it beautifully than a director who can't.

Your first three projects are already scoped: rebuild our website off WordPress onto a platform we can test on (you choose and make the case), run a rapid landing-page testing program with our growth lead, and redesign the enrollment and onboarding flow a teacher goes through after they say yes.

How it should feel. Our brand is warm and human, full of photos and video of real educators, and it's good. The visual system is settled: the fonts, the colors, the feel. Your job is to make it convert and make it testable, not to reinvent it. Our audience is U.S. educators.

Where it grows. Product thinking is the core of this seat, not a nice-to-have. We don't have a product engineering team yet, so product design here starts with the student surfaces we already ship: the onboarding tool in your first six months, then program materials, the learning platform's theme, and the portals we haven't built yet. The information design you do on the website becomes the design language for everything a student touches.

Three things to know about how we work, because they tell you whether this seat is for you:

You'd be making, not managing

We have agencies and freelancers who produce at volume, and a growth lead who sets direction. What we don't have is one person who can take a page from blank to shipped, or a flow from sketch to live, and make it look like us. This seat is in Figma and the site builder most of the day.

We're small, flat and fast

The founders are still in the work. Decisions get made in a conversation, not a committee. You'll work with our co-founder, who is the voice and face of the brand, and with the people who run growth, enrollment and product. We build with Claude Code and expect you to ship pages, prototypes and tests with it.

We sell a regulated degree with integrity, structurally

Teachers are trust professionals and our buyers for life. Every public claim about the degree has to be exact: who awards it, what it costs, what it can and cannot promise. That's a design constraint, not a legal footnote, and the best work here makes the truth land harder than hype would.

What you'll actually do

Rebuild the website. Sequence the story, design the system, build the pages on a platform we can test on, ship, and iterate on what the data says.

Run the testing program. Landing pages for our events and the Master's page, split-tested at a high clip with our growth lead: hypothesis, variant, read, next variant.

Design the enrollment and onboarding flow. The steps between "yes" and day one of class, with our enrollment and product leads. Research with prospects, prototype, test, ship.

Bring the curriculum to life. Turn the program, the framework and the accreditation story into pages, sequences and diagrams a prospective student grasps at a glance.

Design email and the ad-creative system. Lifecycle and campaign email in HubSpot. The visual language for paid social and the first batches yourself; our production partners scale it from there.

Carry the brand into everything else. The learning platform's theme, decks, event materials, internal tools. Shape headlines and copy as you design.

Who we're looking for

A product designer who has owned marketing surfaces. You've designed flows people move through (sign-up, checkout, onboarding) and you've also owned a company's website. Startup experience on a small team, ideally as the first or only designer.

Someone who explains complicated things visually. You've turned a complex product, program or curriculum into a visual system people could follow: program pages, course maps, explainers, decks.

Someone who builds. You've shipped websites you built yourself, in Webflow, Framer or code, and you can show us which parts you built.

Performance-literate. You've run or designed split tests, you read funnels, heatmaps and analytics, and you've changed what you made because of the numbers.

AI-native. You build with Claude Code or the equivalent and ship full pages and working prototypes yourself.

Taste. What you make looks at least as good as what we have now: warm and human, not dark-mode tech.

A writer by necessity. You can shape a headline and cut a paragraph in half, and you'd rather cut than add.

In the open. You show work early, ask for the number, and change your mind when the data says to.

Nice to have: education or mission-driven consumer experience. HubSpot email. Motion.

You do NOT need education-industry experience. We'll teach you the program, the audience and the rules. What we can't teach is taste and the ability to ship.

Growth

This is the first design seat at the company, and it grows with the work. As the engine scales, so does the team around you: production, video, and whoever else the work needs. You'd shape that from the inside, having built the system yourself first.

How we'll hire

A 30-minute portfolio screen with our growth lead and a co-founder, including a live critique of our onboarding tool. A paid design-and-build exercise for finalists (a real page of ours, your sequence, one section built live; about six to eight hours, paid). One conversation with the founders. We may start as a paid project before a full-time hire. We move in weeks, not months.

Compensation & benefits

• Base salary: $130,000–$165,000 for US-based candidates, depending on experience and the depth of what you've shipped; adjusted by location elsewhere

• Stock options

• Health, vision and dental insurance

• 401k and FSA/HSA eligibility

• Unlimited PTO

How to apply

The application asks for three live sites you built, one flow you designed and what changed in the number, one email or ad, and five sentences on what you'd cut from one of our pages. Those matter more than your résumé, and we read every answer.

Breathe for Change is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.

Compensation Range: $130K - $165K