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Founding Designer Jobs (NOW HIRING)

Codes Health

Founding Designer

New York, NY · On-site

  • PTO

You'll be our first designer, own design end to end, and ship fast with the founders. You are someone who likes to: * Design across a large surface area with many different stakeholders. You will ...

Metric Geo

Founding Product Designer

San Francisco, CA · On-site

They are now looking for a Founding Designer to own the connected app experience that pairs with the wearable as they move from early demo to scaled consumer product. What you'll work on: * Owning ...

Genmo

Founding Product Designer

San Francisco, CA · On-site

Role overview We are seeking a passionate and versatile founding Senior Product Designer to spearhead the design of next-generation products and experiences for video creation. This role is pivotal ...

Genmo

Founding Product Designer

San Francisco, CA · On-site

Role overview We are seeking a passionate and versatile founding Senior Product Designer to spearhead the design of next-generation products and experiences for video creation. This role is pivotal ...

Sekai

Founding Product Designer

About the Role We are looking for our first design hire: a Founding Product Designer who can own the user experience end-to-end and raise the quality bar of the product. This is not a supporting ...

Translucent

Product Designer

New York, NY · On-site +1

$140K - $200K/yr

You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with our Founding Designer and Product Engineering to take ideas from rough concept to polished, shipped product. This role is hands-on and craft-focused: less about ...

3Y

AI Product Designer

San Francisco, CA · On-site

$135K - $175K/yr

Founding designer (YC or venture-backed) experience strongly preferred ; portfolio showing systems thinking, data-dense UI, conversational patterns, and a cohesive design system with measurable ...

Jinba

Founding Design Engineer

San Francisco, CA · On-site

$100K - $250K/yr

This is a founding design role for someone who wants to shape how enterprise users interact with AI ... Comfort designing complex interfaces: canvas editors, drag-and-drop builders, multi-step flows

Blitzy

Graphic Designer

Cambridge, MA · On-site

You'll be the visual voice of our revolutionary AI platform, serving as a design partner to our GTM team and working under the guidance of our Senior Graphic Designer and founding designer to create ...

LeftLane

  • Medical

  • Dental

  • Vision

  • PTO

Lead Designer LeftLane is looking for our 1st founding designer for our B2B vSaaS app in the used car space. It is LeftLane's mission to become the operating system for the 70k independent used car ...

LeftLane

Designer

Austin, TX · Hybrid

  • Medical

  • Dental

  • Vision

  • PTO

Lead Designer LeftLane is looking for our 1st founding designer for our B2B vSaaS app in the used car space. It is LeftLane's mission to become the operating system for the 70k independent used car ...

SANS

Senior / Lead Product Designer

Manhattan, NY · On-site

Job Title - Senior / Lead Product Designer Location - New York, NY (Hybrid) Duration - 12+ Months The search XDuce Studio has been exclusively retained to find a founding-level product designer for ...

Outset.ai

Product Designer

San Francisco, CA · On-site

$170K - $220K/yr

You're excited to own problems end-to-end in a fast, AI-native product team, working closely with our Founding Designer and the rest of product and engineering to design generative product ...

C10 Labs

Founding Product Designer

Washington, DC · On-site +1

$40 - $50/hr

Founding Product Designer Department: Buckstop Employment Type: Contract Location: Washington, DC Compensation: $40.00 - $50.00 / hour Description About Buckstop Industries Founded in 2025, Buckstop ...

Casa, Inc

Senior Product Designer

San Francisco, CA · On-site

You care deeply about crafting intuitive, delightful user experiences and have a portfolio that demonstrates your design thinking and process * You're excited to be a founding designer at an early ...

Rox

Product Designer

San Francisco, CA · On-site

About the Role You'll be reporting to our Founding Designer, but the expectation for you to own the assigned scope end-to-end. This is a 60% design / 40% product role. You'll own features end-to-end ...

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Founding Designer information

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How much do founding designer jobs pay per hour?

As of Aug 14, 2026, the average hourly pay for founding designer in the United States is $31.64, according to ZipRecruiter salary data. Most workers in this role earn between $28.85 and $36.30 per hour, depending on experience, location, and employer.

What is a founding designer?

Founding Designers are design professionals who join a company at its earliest stages, often as one of the first design hires or even as a co-founder. Their role goes beyond traditional design work, as they help shape the company's brand, product direction, and user experience from the ground up. Founding Designers collaborate closely with other founding team members, influence the overall vision, and often set the design culture and processes for the organization. Their impact is significant because early design decisions can shape the company's trajectory and influence its long-term success.

What is the difference between Founding Designer vs Product Designer?

AspectFounding DesignerProduct Designer
CredentialsPortfolio, design experience, startup understandingPortfolio, design experience, user-centered design skills
Work EnvironmentEarly-stage startups, founding teamsEstablished companies, product teams
Industry UsageCommon in startups and new venturesWidespread across tech and non-tech companies
Search & Comparison IntentUnderstanding startup roles, founding team contributionsDesign responsibilities, career growth

Founding Designers focus on establishing the visual and user experience foundation in early-stage startups, often wearing multiple hats. Product Designers typically work within established teams to refine and develop products, emphasizing user-centered design. While both roles require strong design skills, Founding Designers are more involved in shaping the company's initial design direction, whereas Product Designers focus on ongoing product development and improvement.

What skills and qualifications are needed to thrive as a founding designer?

To thrive as a Founding Designer, you need a strong foundation in visual and interaction design, a robust portfolio, and experience in early-stage product development. Proficiency with design tools like Figma, Sketch, and Adobe Creative Suite, as well as familiarity with prototyping and collaboration platforms, is essential. Exceptional communication, adaptability, and entrepreneurial thinking help you collaborate effectively with technical and business teams in a dynamic startup environment. These skills ensure you can shape the product vision, build cohesive user experiences, and drive the company's design direction from the ground up.

What are the main challenges a founding designer faces when working in an early-stage startup environment?

As a Founding Designer in an early-stage startup, you'll often work with limited resources and shifting priorities. You'll collaborate closely with founders, engineers, and sometimes directly with customers to shape both the product and the brand vision from the ground up. The role requires balancing rapid prototyping, user feedback, and long-term design strategy, often in a fast-paced and ambiguous environment. While this can be challenging, it also offers significant autonomy and the opportunity to have a major impact on the company's trajectory and culture.
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Founding Designer jobs near you
Infographic showing various Founding Designer job openings in the United States as of August 2026, with employment types broken down into 88% Full Time, 6% Part Time, 1% Temporary, and 5% Contract. Highlights an 87% Physical, 5% Hybrid, and 8% Remote job distribution, with an average salary of $65,817 per year, or $31.6 per hour.

Founding Designer

Codes Health

New York, NY • On-site

Full-time

PTO

Re-posted 13 days ago

Job description

About Codes Health
We're fixing one of the most broken and crucial parts of plaintiff litigation: getting complete, accurate medical records. Today, that takes 30 to 50 days of faxing, calling, and portal-chasing across thousands of providers, each running its own back office.
We deliver records in ~12 days on average. To do this, we're building an agentic layer that operates in this messy, real-world environment. Every retrieval teaches our system how to access another corner of American healthcare, building a provider data layer you can't scrape or buy and putting us at the most upstream point of a $20B+ market where everything downstream depends on us.
This problem extends far beyond the plaintiff legal space. It's also pervasive in healthcare, where our CEO Alvaro first encountered it while running a home health agency, as well as in disability services, life sciences/clinical trials, and the insurance industry. All of these verticals face this same challenge.
"Codes isn't just participating in the workflow; it's capturing the moment where the most important data is created, positioning itself to expand from ingestion into orchestration and ultimately own the entire stack." Amplify Partners, "Boring is Sexy"
We've gone from $0 to a $3M+ run rate in a year and grown 2.5x quarter over quarter for four straight quarters. We've raised $17M from Amplify, General Catalyst, Haystack, and Y Combinator. We serve 130+ law firms across plaintiff litigation and mass tort, including the largest plaintiff firm in the country.
The Work
Design is central to what we build. Our work is responsible for critical legal and medical workflows; the job is all about maximizing simplicity while minimizing loss of fidelity. Our customers do not care about the latest model update or extraction pipelines. They care about results: getting full information as quickly as possible. You'll be the one 'behind the curtain', modulating the experience between the two extremes.
You'll be our first designer, own design end to end, and ship fast with the founders. You are someone who likes to:
  • Design across a large surface area with many different stakeholders. You will spend as much time on critical internal tools as you will customer facing product.
  • Simplify extremely large contexts. Medical records are comprised of messy, conflicting, scanned, duplicative, and largely faxed information, ingested thousands of pages at a time.
  • Design for scale. Customers run thousands of cases at once, so the product has to work just as well in aggregate as it does for individual cases.
  • Layer in AI as a tool, not an outcome. Every workflow should be facilitated or automated with AI, and the user should barely realize that it's there.
  • Shape our design language and system from the ground up, within the context of our customers and industry.

Who we're looking for
  • You've been the first or an early designer somewhere and want to own the function.
  • You're senior enough to run design solo and set your own direction.
  • You make dense products feel simple, and your portfolio shows it.
  • You notice the drop-off in a flow, dig into why, and bring us the project.
  • You're excited about AI-native product and how people work with it.
  • You prototype fast, ideally in code.
  • You're primarily a product designer who can stretch into brand.

Non-negotiables
  • Fully in person in Dumbo, Brooklyn.
  • A portfolio.

Tools
Built on shadcn and Tailwind. No design system yet, so you'll build it. Figma or code, we don't mind how you get there.
Compensation
Competitive base salary, meaningful early-stage equity, 15 days PTO, and benefits.

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