Product Design Lead — United States

Teams that build aircraft, spacecraft, defense systems and large infrastructure run their work across a patchwork of separate tools: schedules in one place, requirements in another, architecture models and risk registers somewhere else. Keeping them consistent is slow, manual and error-prone.

This company brings project management and systems engineering together in one integrated model. Its ontology engine keeps the model consistent, guides teams through a sound engineering method, and generates integration plans automatically.

We’re a small founding team with a working product, built on React, TypeScript and Next.js. We launch in 2027 with university senior-design (capstone) programs, then expand to engineering firms, enterprise programs and defense contractors.

The role

You’ll be our first and only designer. Your job is to turn the Product Lead’s ideas into clear, attractive interfaces with good UX, planned so the whole product makes sense together. You’ll also build the brand: our identity, our website and the experience customers have with us from first visit to first project.

This is a design role, not an engineering role. Our engineers build the product, and you’ll work closely with them, but your craft is UI, UX, product design and brand. It’s an individual-contributor role with founder-level influence over everything customers see, starting from a clean slate: there is no existing brand, logo or Figma library.

Scope of work

Product, UI and UX design (about 70% of your time)

• Work with the founders to turn feature ideas into designs: what a feature does, how it looks, and how it fits the rest of the product.

• Plan the product’s structure: information architecture, navigation and workflows for dense engineering data such as requirements, schedules, architecture diagrams, traceability and configuration baselines.

• Create the design system: color, type and spacing tokens, component guidelines and a Figma library that matches our coded component library, including light and dark themes.

• Redesign the current product into one consistent, easy-to-use interface, starting with the hardest views: the architecture diagram, the node editor and our data tables.

• Produce a Figma design, linked from the GitHub issue, for every new feature, page or workflow, solid enough for anyone on the team to build from.

• Review built screens against your designs, using the before-and-after screenshots that come with each visual change.

• Design the academic experience, including self-serve sign-up and payment for student teams, course setup and instructor views. Then design enterprise administration, including roles, permissions and admin screens.

• Run usability sessions with students, instructors and practicing engineers, and turn what you learn into product changes.

• Own our accessibility standard (WCAG 2.1 AA), with particular care for keyboard and screen-reader use of diagrams.

Brand, website and customer experience (about 30%)

• Create the brand from scratch: name treatment, logo, typography, color and visual voice.

• Design and maintain the marketing website, product screenshots and demo videos.

• Shape the customer experience end to end: the journey from website to sign-up to first project, onboarding flows, in-app guidance, help content and customer emails.

• Design sales and investor materials, including presentations, one-pagers, case studies and proposal templates, plus conference and printed material.

• Handle illustration, simple video and copy polish yourself. There is no separate agency or contractor budget for this work.

Your first year

• Before our paid beta (mid-2027): the design system in Figma, a redesign of the current views, and a brand and website ready for customers.

• By fall 2027: a student team can find us, sign up, pay and start a project without help.

• By the end of the year: findings from at least two university cohorts are in the product, and the enterprise administration screens are designed.

What we’re looking for

Required

• 5+ years of UI/UX or product design for software, including at least 2 years on complex B2B or technical tools (engineering, data, developer or enterprise software).

• A portfolio that shows both product design (workflows, information architecture, interaction design) and brand work (identity, a website or a campaign).

• Expert Figma skills, including component libraries, variables and design tokens.

• Strong UX research habits: usability testing, and turning findings into decisions.

• The ability to take a rough idea, ask the right questions, and come back with a design that makes the idea clear.

• Comfort as the only designer: making decisions, explaining them clearly, and defending them with founders and customers.

Nice to have

• Working knowledge of HTML, CSS and Tailwind CSS, enough to read front-end code and adjust a component or style. Writing production code is not required.

• Experience designing diagrams and large data tables (we use React Flow and TanStack Table).

• Experience with systems engineering, MBSE/SysML, PLM, requirements tools, or aerospace and defense programs.

• Accessibility audits and VPAT preparation.

• Early-stage startup experience.

Who you’ll work with

You’ll report to our CEO and Product Lead, whose ideas you’ll turn into designs. You’ll work every day with our CTO and our Director of Product Development, who both build the product and will review the built result with you. You won’t manage anyone.

How we work

• Fully remote, anywhere in the US.

• Two- to three-week sprints in lean Scrum with retrospectives. All work is tracked in GitHub Issues.

• We design for desktop and laptop first (1280 px and up) on current Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari. Tablet viewing comes later.

• Tools: Figma, GitHub, Microsoft 365 and Claude. AI-assisted work is part of how we operate.

• Travel is not normally required, but you should be willing to travel about one week a quarter when needed.

• Onboarding includes sessions with our engineers on tools and process, and a walkthrough of the engineering method with the Product Lead.

Compensation and benefits

• Salary: $115,000 to $140,000 a year, negotiable.

• Time off: 11 paid holidays, 15 days of paid time off rising to 20 days from year 3, and 7 sick days.

• Parental leave: 12 weeks at full pay for any new parent, whether by birth, adoption or foster placement, plus 4 more weeks for the birthing parent (16 weeks in total). Eligibility begins after 6 months, and your job is protected from day one.

• Health: medical, dental and vision insurance.

• Protection: life and disability insurance.

• Retirement: 401(k) with a 3% company match.

• Equipment: a new laptop and a monthly home-internet stipend.

• Tools: company-paid software, including Figma, Google Workspace, and Claude.

• Team time: an annual in-person company gathering.