Product Designer

About the role

We're hiring our founding designer to join the small, high-output product and engineering teams at Adapt. This is an end-to-end product design role. You'll help define how companies build, run, and govern their central agent with Adapt, from customer problem through exploration, implementation, launch, and learning from real use.

Responsibilities

• High-quality execution. Design, prototype, and ship product surfaces, flows, and system patterns that feel clear, coherent, and right.
• Shipping frequently. Ship boulders like core product surfaces and design-system foundations, stones like smaller polish passes and component upgrades, and pebbles like copy fixes, icon tweaks, and alignment improvements regularly and consistently.
• Owning the product experience. Set and hold the bar across Adapt's core product surfaces in Slack and web, including setup, integrations, agent behavior, trust, and control.
• Building the design system. Not a Figma library that nobody uses — a real, code-backed system that the engineering team (and coding agents) reaches for by default, and that lets us move faster as we grow.
• Customer discovery. Sit directly alongside our early customers and the many ahead to understand their pain points using Adapt and feed those into proposals and shipped design work.
• Strong internal and external communication. Work directly with customers to understand what they need and make the product easier to understand and use.
• Set a high bar. Lead by example. Expect mentorship, but bring a strong default to figuring things out yourself — especially the pace of an early-stage startup in a crowded AI market.
• Collaboration. Work shoulder-to-shoulder with the team and leadership in San Francisco. We bias toward shipping, together. Work directly with leadership: your manager (me, Dustin 👋), our CTO and co-founder Sean Smith, and the rest of the leadership team.

Requirements

Years aren't all equal (startup years are like dog years, as an example) and they're not the best predictor of success. That being said, you probably exhibit most of these characteristics:

• 4-7+ years of professional product design experience, ideally in AI, developer tools, infrastructure, enterprise software, or data products
• Experience working at an early stage (seed, Series A, Series B) startup, or a strong portfolio of personal/side projects that shows range
• Expertise in Figma, with fluency in modern prototyping methods
• Comfort writing front-end code — HTML/CSS/Tailwind at minimum, ideally React — and shipping your own work to production with engineers (or directly)
• A portfolio that shows shipped product work, complex systems made understandable, and end-to-end ownership from the customer problem through implementation
• A strong interest in many of the latest and greatest AI tools and models, and an opinion on what AI products should feel like
• A consistent track-record of design work that you drove end-to-end — from the customer problem through the final shipped pixel
• A genuine desire to grow the craft of design and product-building (you could call it "taste"), with an eye for the little big details across type, color, motion, copy, and information density

Qualifications

Competitive compensation strategy including large equity grants for early hires at an early stage in the company's journey
Inclusive healthcare packages (medical, dental, vision)
Top-tier equipment: latest Apple silicon (Mac Studio / MacBook Pro), 5K display, and any peripherals you need to do your best work
Frontier AI access for every engineer and designer: Claude Code, OpenAI, Cursor, Codex, and most importantly unlimited internal use of Adapt itself
Daily catered lunch in our Presidio (San Francisco) office, plus snacks and coffee
A founder-dense, in-person team in one of the most beautiful corners of San Francisco — direct access to the CEO, CTO, and founding eng/design every day
Base salary: $180-220k for the SF Bay Area. Actual offer depends on skills, experience, and location.

Skills

Have not worked as a professional designer in any capacity for any company
Prefer working with a formalized product function or PM handing you specs
Think design ends when the Figma file is handed off, and don't want to be in the code or the pull request
Wait for direction and clarity and don't enjoy making decisions independently
Optimize for portfolio projects instead of the work itself
Don't enjoy talking directly to customers

Benefits

Competitive compensation strategy including large equity grants for early hires at an early stage in the company's journey
Inclusive healthcare packages (medical, dental, vision)
Top-tier equipment: latest Apple silicon (Mac Studio / MacBook Pro), 5K display, and any peripherals you need to do your best work
Frontier AI access for every engineer and designer: Claude Code, OpenAI, Cursor, Codex, and most importantly unlimited internal use of Adapt itself
Daily catered lunch in our Presidio (San Francisco) office, plus snacks and coffee
A founder-dense, in-person team in one of the most beautiful corners of San Francisco — direct access to the CEO, CTO, and founding eng/design every day
Base salary: $180-220k for the SF Bay Area. Actual offer depends on skills, experience, and location.

Pay

Base salary: $180-220k for the SF Bay Area. Actual offer depends on skills, experience, and location.

Schedule

Not specified