- hands-on designer, not a PM.
- Exceptional creative taste, checked against user data
- 2–3+ years of real design work.
The founder is the product visionary and intends to stay that way. What he lacks is a designer whose taste he can trust without approving every screen. Right now each UI decision routes through him, and that doesn’t scale while the team tests several interface directions for Videoclaw. The core question is how to keep the flexibility of a prompt box while adding enough guided structure, such as model choices and starting points, that new users don’t stall, without the product turning into a rigid “Canva-style” SaaS tool.
Day to day, this person designs and prototypes competing UI directions from scratch. They ship screens to the devs, then benchmark the resulting user flows against drop-off and session data. The single most important spike is creative sensitivity: noticing that a gray is off, a shadow is too heavy, or a texture or duotone would carry the right emotion, and caring how people feel when they use the product. Data-driven iteration matters but is secondary, since the devs share that load. Leadership needs are light (about 3/10): enough to brief the devs and move work forward without the founder in the room. Long term, the founder wants to grow this person into head of product.
What You’ll Own / Do
- Design Videoclaw’s core creation flow end to end
- Prototype and test competing UI directions quickly
- Choose winners using user flows, session replays and drop-off data
- Set the visual and emotional quality bar across the product
- Brief the full-stack engineers directly and ship with them the same day
- Find references outside video software so Videoclaw looks unlike its category
Requirements
Technical
- Strong visual and interaction design craft
- Portfolio of screens designed from scratch, not just adapted
- Product UI/UX experience on a shipped product
- Comfortable with AI-assisted design workflows
Execution & Ownership
- Can direct engineers without a manager in between
- Organized enough to track your own work and decisions
- Checks design calls against user data, not intuition alone
Background
- 2–3+ years of real UI/UX or product design after school
- Real ownership of screens or flows in past roles
Location & Visa
- In person in San Francisco, 5 days a week, at a founding-team pace
- US citizens and permanent residents, F-1 OPT, or H-1B/O-1 transfers
Nice-to-Have
- Designed for a prompt-to-create product (Lovable, Replit, Bolt.new, Emergent)
- Canva or other creative-tool design experience
- You make video or run an active creator account
- Design school background such as SCAD
- Interest in growing toward head of product
Who Will Thrive Here
- You feel a personal pull toward video and creative tools
- You have strong opinions on texture, color and feel, but let the user data win when it disagrees
- You do well with an intuitive founder and bring some of the structure yourself
- You want an intense, in-person team that ships every day
- You work hard and know how to rest, so you can keep the pace up