Founding Designer

About the role

Concourse is building the operating system for State and Local governments. Our platform is a configurable approach to tackling fragmented government data and workflows and turning them into smooth operations for public servants and the constituents they serve. As a Concourse Product Designer, you're not just designing screens for a single product, you're defining the design language of the public sector. You will own the foundational layer of the interface: the tokens, primitives, components, motion, and patterns that everything above them is built on. Your role is to empower our Forward-Deployed PMs who sit alongside city and county teams, understand their specific workflows, and assemble each agency's solution. Examples include a bail management system for a county courthouse, the IT Helpdesk for a school district, a water utility operations dashboard, and a financial aid application. Your job is to make sure that no matter the problem space, using the product is intuitive and feels unmistakably like Concourse. You're working on the design questions that make every deployment possible: how to model any government process in a set of primitives constrained enough for a non-engineer to assemble, how to make a fourteen-step statutory review feel simple to someone filling it out on a phone during their lunch break, and how to hold a pixel standard across hundreds of deployments with different audiences and mandates. These are hard, unsolved problems. Nobody has designed public services at this scale with these tools. The person who gets it right sets what government software feels like for the next decade.

Responsibilities

• Define the design language of Concourse: conventions (casing, form patterns, error and empty states, motion, authentication flows) that every product inherits
• Own the design library every Concourse product is built on, from tokens and primitives through components, motion, templates, and documentation
• Ship all of it as production front‑end code, built with AI agents alongside engineers, rather than as Figma files for somebody else to interpret
• Create flexible components that Forward‑Deployed PMs can leverage, configurable enough to model many workflows and constrained enough that a non‑engineer can assemble a product without breaking the standard
• Find elegant solutions for complicated government workflows: multi‑approver reviews, conditional fee schedules, statutory deadlines, and legacy data models never designed to be seen by the public

Requirements

• 5+ years of product design experience, including early‑stage startup experience
• US citizen or authorized to work in the U.S.
• Willing to work in‑person in Flatiron, NYC (5 days/week)

Qualifications

• Portfolio demonstrating end‑to‑end shipped work under real client pressure and constraints
• Hands‑on experience using AI coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Factory, etc.) as a core part of daily workflow
• Design system you have built or substantially shaped that has held up across more than one product

Skills

• High‑agency, high‑velocity mindset with exceptional work ethic
• Comfort operating in extreme ambiguity (starting from statutes, legacy screens, unclear partner needs)
• Pixel‑level standards coupled with systems thinking
• Comfort delivering production front‑end code; Figma as a thinking tool, not the output
• Strong relationship‑building skills with non‑technical stakeholders (county clerks, school IT directors, etc.)