Founding Product Designer Jobs (NOW HIRING)

The problem Hera is solving
Every complex system in America has a profession whose job it is to be your trusted guide. The legal system has lawyers. Taxes have accountants. Healthcare, a trillion-dollar industry that touches every family, leaves us on our own.
99% of care happens when someone steps outside the four walls of a doctor's office. Hera is creating a new profession to fill that last-mile gap: the Hero, a dedicated senior care expert for your family. Our Heroes educate, coordinate, and advocate for the most vulnerable population in the country. We're covered by insurance, so we can serve every family in America.
The bottleneck isn't demand, it's supply. There aren't enough experts to serve every family who needs us. To scale, we need to unbundle expertise from any one human and broaden the aperture of who can become a Hero. We're building a platform that turns anyone capable of fostering human connection into a world-class care expert and upholds our brand promise at every touchpoint.
Healthcare navigation today runs on tribal knowledge. One social worker knows the trick to expediting Medicaid in New York. Another knows which home-visiting physical therapist families actually love. Our platform captures every interaction, every solved problem, every hard-won insight from our expert Heroes in the field - and turns it into compounding intelligence that makes every user on the platform smarter. Think Waymo's approach to autonomy: high-quality human experts do the driving today, and every mile they log trains the system..
Why design matters more here than anywhere else
We're in the business of trust. We're designing for the most emotionally charged moments of our customers' lives. Hera's brand promise is simple: care that would only be great enough for our own parents. That promise is our moat. It's what physicians refer to, what families buy, what Heroes deliver, and what the product must unlock and enforce at every touchpoint.
We serve two audiences that most tech startups never build for: social workers and nurses on one side, aging parents and their adult children on the other. Trust is built or broken in every interaction, and the product is where that trust lives.
What we believe in design at Hera
We want Hera to have a soul. That means every touchpoint with Hera, the brand, the product, the first phone call, should make you feel taken care of. The product should be incredibly intuitive (that your grandma can figure it out) and opinionated; it's not giving you all the bells and whistles but holding your hand on the best way to use it. The products I love, Granola, Arc, Linear, have a soul and just work magically in the background. Someone was in the room making decisions about what mattered and what didn't. It's the opposite of the AI slop flooding the world right now.
Healthcare is the worst offender. Clinicians can be incredible, but the systems and software around them are built without trust or care - and families feel it. We obsess over the details because that's where trust gets built. I care, maybe too much, where I'll give feedback on copy that's already fine and I'll send you a slack at midnight about a font weight. If that sounds annoying, we probably won't work well together but if it sounds invigorating to give a damn, come build with us.
About the role
You'd be the founding product designer at Hera. You'll own three surfaces:

• The Hero platform - the AI teammate that is guiding our Heroes in doing their job ensuring expert-level care at every interaction
• The family experience - how aging parents and their adult children find us, trust us, and stay with us through the hardest experience of their lives
• The brand that binds them - the visual and interaction language that signals, in the first thirty seconds, that Hera is human and soulful

You'll report to Jenny (CEO) and partner daily with Myles (CTO), building alongside our founding engineers and Heroes in the field. This role sits at the intersection of design, product, and research. You'll shape strategy, not just execute on it, defining this new profession.
What you'll do

• Own surfaces end to end. Partner with Jenny, Myles, engineers, and Heroes to define problems, prototype solutions and ship. You stay on a surface from first sketch through launch and iteration - no handoffs to a next-phase owner.
• Embed with Heroes and families. Sit in on assessments, listen to hard calls, watch how expertise actually moves between humans today.
• Prototype in AI, QA in code. Start in an LLM to clarify intent and pressure-test flows. Use Claude Code or Cursor to prototype interactions fast. Bring validated work into Figma for state coverage, system alignment if needed.
• Build the system as you go. Establish the design language, component patterns, and brand foundation that will carry Hera from founding team to category-defining company.
• Protect the 'shape'. Make the product choices about what belongs in the product and what doesn't. The default answer to "can we add this?" is no.

You might be a fit if you:

• 5-8 years of experience as a designer building products in ambiguous spaces.
• Active use of LLMs in how you build
• Have a portfolio with craft and range across both systems-heavy software and emotionally-weighted consumer experiences
• Get energy from being embedded with your users.
• Care about tone and emotional weight as much as flows and components
• Want the PM/design hybrid scope - not despite the ambiguity but because of it

Our founding team
We closed a 7M seed round led by Accel and 10'xed revenue over the last 6 months organically through close partnerships with Weill Cornell, NYU Langone, and Mount Sinai. We've been doing fun things in the community along the way (threw an art show for an 88 year old artist that went viral) and the customer feedback is the most positive our team has seen in our careers. You'll build Hera alongside co-founders Jenny, Myles & Connie and a team from Headway and Palantir. We are in person in NYC. Read our story and watch our launch video here.
In a world of growing cynicism we chase hard truths, give a damn, and build.

• Our entire team believes truth is in the field. This means we are side by side with our Heroes everyday, learning what it takes to do the job and do it well.
• We are high autonomy and trust. There is no space for micromanagement, if you see a problem or think of a solution, you are empowered to run at it wholeheartedly and know that the team has your back.
• We are creative in our bones. For the first time in many years, we are seeing the genesis of a new profession of a profound scale and importance; it's on us to define what it can and should look like.

Our promise is we will stretch your limits, and trust you to own unreasonably substantial outcomes. If this speaks to you, let's talk: jenny@hellohera.com