Founding UX Designer

Founding Designer Stealth AI Commerce Company The opportunity This is an opportunity to join a unique founding team of seasoned commerce operators working to define the next generation of experiences in the AI marketplace. If you are looking for authorship—not simply another design role—and have the ambition to create the user experience patterns others will follow, this may be the opportunity for you. As commerce moves beyond traditional websites and apps into AI assistants, agents, and interoperable platforms, the customer journey is being fundamentally redesigned. Discovery, consideration, transactions, and support will increasingly happen across distributed interfaces—sometimes without the customer ever visiting a traditional storefront. We are looking for a Founding Designer to help define what these new experiences should feel like for businesses, consumers, and the AI agents acting on their behalf. This is not a traditional product design role focused on optimizing a single interface. It requires a systems thinker who can design across headless and interoperable environments while translating complex technology into intuitive, trusted, and commercially valuable experiences. You will work directly with the founder and founding engineering and AI leaders to turn an ambitious product vision into experiences that can shape a new category. What you will own Define the future of commerce journeys - Design end-to-end journeys across AI discovery, evaluation, recommendations, booking, purchasing, fulfillment, and support. - Explore how consumers and businesses interact when the primary interface may be an AI assistant rather than a website or app. - Translate complex agentic systems, permissions, policies, and data flows into simple and trustworthy experiences. - Define the right balance between human control and AI autonomy throughout the commerce journey. - Identify new experience patterns for transactions that move across AI platforms, merchant systems, and customer touchpoints. Design interoperable systems - Create experience models that work across headless, modular, and distributed environments. - Think beyond individual screens to design systems of interactions across merchants, consumers, AI platforms, and service providers. - Partner with engineering and AI leaders to connect experience design with system architecture, data, and platform capabilities. - Establish reusable patterns that can scale across industries, merchant types, use cases, and AI platforms. Build the product experience - Lead research, journey mapping, service design, prototyping, and product design from early concepts through implementation. - Turn ambiguous business and technical challenges into clear workflows and testable experiences. - Prototype rapidly to help the team learn from customers and make better product decisions. - Create and evolve the company’s design system as the product grows. - Maintain a high bar for usability, accessibility, clarity, trust, and craft. Help shape the brand - Translate the company’s strategy into a distinctive visual and experiential identity. - Support the company website, user interface, product storytelling, presentations, launch materials, and focused marketing initiatives. - Create a consistent experience across the brand, product, and customer journey. - Work scrappily when needed—moving between foundational systems thinking and hands-on execution without losing sight of the broader vision. What we are looking for - A strong product and systems designer who sees experiences as interconnected journeys rather than isolated screens. - Experience designing complex platforms, ecosystems, marketplaces, commerce products, AI products, or enterprise workflows. - Deep understanding of user experience, interaction design, information architecture, and service design. - Comfort working with headless systems, APIs, modular platforms, or products that operate across multiple interfaces. - The ability to make highly technical concepts understandable and intuitive for non-technical users. - Strong visual design and prototyping skills, with the ability to move from early concepts to polished execution. - Commercial judgment and an understanding of how design influences adoption, trust, conversion, retention, and customer value. - Comfort operating in ambiguity and helping define the product—not simply receiving requirements. - A highly collaborative working style and the ability to build closely with product, engineering, AI, data, and go-to-market leaders. - The range and humility to define a foundational commerce journey one day and improve a website or customer-facing asset the next. You may be especially well suited if - You are energized by designing experiences for technologies and behaviors that do not yet have established conventions. - You enjoy connecting customer needs, business strategy, and technical architecture. - You believe the future of design extends beyond screens. - You are curious about how AI agents will discover businesses, evaluate choices, make recommendations, transact, and collaborate with people. - You want meaningful ownership in shaping both a company and a new category. What success looks like In your first stage with the company, you will help: - Establish the experience vision and core design principles for the company. - Define the primary journeys for businesses, consumers, and AI agents. - Translate the initial product architecture into clear, testable prototypes. - Conduct customer discovery and incorporate real-world feedback into the product. - Build the first version of a scalable design system. - Strengthen the company’s website, brand experience, and product storytelling. - Create experiences that demonstrate measurable commercial value for early customers. How we work We are an early-stage company operating at the intersection of AI, commerce, and platform infrastructure. Our founding team combines deep experience across commerce, payments, marketplaces, AI, and global technology platforms. We expect founding-team members to think strategically, execute directly, learn quickly, and build closely with customers. We prioritize practice over theory. We use early implementations and customer case studies to test assumptions, understand emerging technologies, and determine what creates real commercial value. This role is for someone who wants to help invent the future of commerce—not wait for the patterns to become obvious. Role structure This is a founding-team opportunity with meaningful influence over the product, company, and future design organization. The working relationship may begin with a defined, hands-on trial project so both sides can evaluate collaboration, execution, and long-term fit before making a broader commitment. Compensation and equity will reflect the company’s stage, the scope of the role, and the structure of the engagement.