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Founding Designer

Founding Designer to own all design at a Series A relationship intelligence startup: product, brand, marketing, and design system from scratch. Strong preference for candidates who can ship production-ready work in code.

175k – 205kSan Francisco, CANew York, NYProduct DesignRemote

About the role

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.

Skills

Product DesignDesign SystemsTypographyBrand DesignPrototypingReactCSSFigmaMarketing DesignVisual Design

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