Job Description

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.

We are particularly seeking a designer who cares deeply about taste, craft, and shipping, with the agency to turn ambiguous problems into clear, high-quality product experiences. You should be comfortable building a design system and prototyping or shipping in code when that's the fastest way to make progress.

About you

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
• Strong interest in many of the latest and greatest AI tools and models, and an opinion on what AI products should feel like
• Consistent track-record of design work that you drove end-to-end — from the customer problem through the final shipped pixel
• Ability to break down a vague, ambiguous problem into something concrete and shippable (you may have found yourself saying "the fastest way to decide this is to prototype it")
• Care deeply about users — you've got receipts of customer-driven design decisions, and when something you designed frustrates someone, you feel it
• 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

How you'll be successful

As the founding designer at Adapt, you own product design end-to-end, from the customer Slack thread through exploration, implementation, shipping, and learning from real use. Your job isn't done until customers love what you built and how it works. As we scale, you'll own and grow the design function. Concretely, you're responsible for:

• High-quality execution. This is the central responsibility of any designer. You design, prototype, and ship product surfaces, flows, and system patterns that feel clear, coherent, and right.
• Shipping frequently. You 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. You 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. You'll 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. You 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. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with the team and leadership in San Francisco. We bias toward shipping, together.

You'll also work directly with leadership: your manager ( me, Dustin), our CTO and co-founder Sean Smith, and the rest of the leadership team.

How you may fail

Perhaps it's also helpful to evaluate a candidate who may not be successful at Adapt and apply inversion theory. You will not be successful if you:

• 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
• Only focus on the happy path and leave systems, states, permissions, and recovery to engineering
• Think design ends when the Figma file is handed off, and don't want to be in the code or the pull request
• Find yourself waiting 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

What is excellence in this role

The role of leadership is to cultivate a sense of excellence on the team and in individuals on the team that reflect it. A simple way to frame it is a three-part framework:

• What is the job to be done (see above)
• What is excellence in that job
• Holding accountable to excellence (that's both your job and mine!)

You establish excellence in this role by doing the following:

• In the first 30 days you independently ship requested and impactful product design work with some guidance and direction.
• In the next 30 days, you're moving more towards fuller independence, proposing ideas and talking to customers to gain conviction as to why they're worth investing in (and also shipping them), and you've started laying the foundations of the design system.
• By 90 days, you're driving your own bets, closing the loop directly with customers, owning the product experience of every new surface that ships, and you're feeling independent and cooking
• After 90 days and beyond, any requisite training wheels are off and you're feeling empowered to own decisions, propose improvements, and you've established a strong customer-centric and craft-centric understanding of the Adapt product and design system and where they're going.

After 90 days and beyond, any requisite training wheels are off and you're feeling empowered to own decisions, propose improvements, and you've established a strong customer-centric understanding of the platform we have and how it can be improved. We also expect your judgment to raise the bar for the team around you.

• Competitive compensation strategy including large equity grants for early hires at an early stage in the company's journey
• 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. We're open to relocation for the right candidate but prefer Bay Area applicants today. Total comp also includes equity, benefits, and potential bonus or variable pay.

Adapt is committed to fostering and empowering an inclusive community within our organization. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Adapt encourages everyone to apply for our available positions, even if they don't necessarily check every box on the job description.

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