Founding Designer

What You Will Do

• Own product design end to end. The flows, the components, the interaction patterns, the system that ties them together.
• Build and evolve our design system. Color, typography, spacing, components, made scalable enough that the next ten engineers ship fast without breaking the visual bar.
• Own the brand. The identity, the voice, the way Centralize looks and feels across every surface beyond the product.
• Design the marketing assets. The website, launch material, decks, and social, often the first impression anyone has of Centralize.
• Talk to customers. Sit on sales calls, watch users navigate the product, and turn what you see into design decisions.
• Set the standard for visual and craft quality at Centralize, and raise it every day.
• Lay the foundation for the design team you will eventually help hire and lead.

What Success Looks Like

• Week 1: First design shipped to production.
• Day 30: Owning the design of a major product surface end to end, with the design system taking shape.
• Day 90: The product and brand feel noticeably better than the day you joined, the design system is yours, and customers are commenting on the craft.

What We Are Looking For

• A portfolio that makes the case for itself. We care about the work, not the resume. Show us the product surfaces, the brand work, and the details you've shipped.
• Sharp visual taste. You can look at a screen and see what's wrong, and look at a blank screen and know what should go there.
• Range across product design, design systems, typography, and brand. You move between a dense enterprise workflow and a marketing page without losing the thread.
• The instinct to think past the template. You find the solution nobody else saw, and you can tell when the unexpected choice is the right one.
• You don't stop at the static mockup. At minimum you prototype your designs to a high fidelity, and ideally you take them into code yourself, whether by hand or with tools like Claude Code. The dream hire ships their own work to production.
• Excellent written and verbal English communication. You can explain a design decision in a doc, defend it in a meeting, and demo it to a customer.
• Demonstrated ability to operate independently. We give you the goal, not the steps.

This Role Is Not For You If

• You want a team of designers around you to bounce ideas off. You will be our first designer, and the bar is set by you.
• You want to work only on product, or only on brand. This role owns all of it.
• You optimize for the perfect design at the expense of shipping. We grade on what's in production, not what's in Figma.
• You want a slower pace. We work hard and move quickly. Please only apply if that excites you.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience as the first designer or a design-leaning founding hire at a fast-growing startup.
• Background shipping consumer-grade UI in a B2B product. Bonus if you've worked in CRM, sales tools, or other enterprise software categories.
• Fluency building in code (React, modern CSS) and shipping your own designs to production.
• Experience building and maintaining a design system at scale.
• Brand or marketing design work that shows range beyond the product.
• Interest in growing into a design leader and building the team.