Founding Product Designer

Knit is an AI-native research agency seeking its first product designer to define and elevate the product experience. The role owns end-to-end design, establishes the design system, improves complex workflows, and uses customer research to shape how researchers and AI agents interact with the product.

Responsibilities:

• Lead design initiatives from problem discovery and early concepts through prototyping, implementation, and iteration. Work closely with PMs and engineers to turn ideas into shipped products. Move quickly, make thoughtful tradeoffs, and take ownership of the quality of what ships
• Create and maintain a design system with reusable components, patterns, and guidelines that PMs, engineers and AI agents can use across the product. Establish clear design standards that help humans & AIs make good decisions independently. Own the visual quality and consistency of our product, ensuring every interface is polished, intuitive, and true to Knit's brand
• Continuously evaluate our product to identify usability issues and opportunities for improvement. Simplify complex workflows, rethink information architecture and interactions, and design intuitive end-to-end experiences. Know when to improve an existing interface and when to rethink the experience entirely
• Use a mix of qual and quant research. Work directly with enterprise customers, researchers, and internal teams to understand their needs, workflows, and challenges. Observe users, conduct interviews and usability tests, and use what you learn to inform designs. Use tools like Amplitude to understand what users are doing at scale. Look beyond what users ask for to understand the problems they're trying to solve

Requirements:

• exceptional visual taste with strong UX thinking and product judgment
• senior, hands-on product designer with exceptional visual craft, strong product instincts, and the independence to establish design at Knit
• 7+ years of product design experience
• A track record of independently owning, designing and shipping digital products, from discovery through launch at early stage startups
• Experience as a founding or early designer who helped establish a company's design standards and practices
• Experience building and maintaining scalable design systems, reusable components, and consistent patterns that PMs, engineers, and AI agents can use
• Experience working in fast-moving environments
• Able to prototype, test, iterate, and ship quickly while knowing when to prioritize speed and when to invest in polish
• A portfolio of beautifully designed product interfaces that demonstrates strong visual taste, attention to detail, and polish
• Able to simplify complex workflows, solve ambiguous user problems, and design intuitive experiences
• Understands both user needs and business goals
• Understands frontend development principles and constraints, works closely with engineers, and cares about implementation quality
• Experience conducting user interviews, usability testing, and workflow analysis to inform design decisions
• Able to clearly explain design decisions, discuss tradeoffs, challenge assumptions, and work effectively with cross-functional teams
• Experience designing complex B2B SaaS, enterprise software, data-heavy products, or productivity tools
• Experience designing AI-native products, including conversational interfaces, agentic workflows, or human-in-the-loop experiences
• Familiarity with consumer research, analytics, or research operations