As Founding Product Designer, you will be Skyward's first design hire and a core member of the Engineering, Product, and Design (EPD) team. You will have end-to-end ownership of the product experience—from problem exploration and user research through high-level interface design and design systems that scale.
You will work closely with engineering and product to shape AI-powered governance, risk, and compliance software, turning complex flows into intuitive, pleasant experiences. This role is ideal for someone who wants to build the design practice at a startup from the ground up—defining standards, process, and culture—while staying deeply connected to the craft.
- End-to-end product design: Research, conceptualize, prototype, and ship user experiences that simplify complex compliance and risk workflows.
- Discovery and research: Co-lead problem exploration with product and engineering—talking to customers, testing hypotheses, and synthesizing actionable insights.
- Experience architecture: Turn complex workflows into clear journeys, with navigation, AI, and content aligned to business goals and user needs.
- UI and prototyping: Produce wireframes, flows, interactive prototypes, and mocks that guide the engineering team.
- EPD collaboration: Work side by side with founders, engineering, and AI to align on problems, solutions, priorities, and trade-offs.
- Measurement and iteration: Define success criteria for your work and use quantitative and qualitative data to iterate continuously.
- Design culture: Put in place healthy feedback, documentation, and process practices—including design reviews and collaboration on product exploration.
- AI in the design process: Experiment with AI tools across research, ideation, prototyping, and handoff, always looking for better ways to work.
- Hiring and team: Support defining future design profiles and building a world-class product team.
- 3 to 5+ years in Product Design, UX, or Interaction Design, ideally at high-growth SaaS companies.
- A strong portfolio showing how you've solved complex problems and guided users through difficult flows simply and elegantly.
- Experience working closely with product managers and engineering in iterative product cycles.
- Comfort leading discovery, user interviews, usability testing, and insight synthesis.
- Proficiency with modern design and prototyping tools, ideally Figma.
- Experience contributing to design systems and reusable components.
- Ability to juggle multiple projects while maintaining high visual and interaction quality.
- An AI-supported design workflow, or deep curiosity about integrating AI into your day to day.
- Experience working remotely on distributed teams, with excellent written and verbal communication.
- You're an optimist about the future of software and how AI redefines what we can build.
- You thrive in startups—you handle ambiguity well and are motivated by high responsibility and low drama.
- You're passionate about understanding users and their contexts, not just polishing interfaces.
- You know how to balance speed and quality: when to explore many options and when to make a good call and move on.
- You have strong opinions, loosely held, and treat feedback as a natural part of the process.
- You care about both craft and strategy: you can talk spacing and typography, but also metrics, positioning, and business.
- You're excited to shape a company's design culture and practice from its early stages.
- Experience designing B2B tools and products in compliance, risk, audit, fintech, legal tech, or other regulated industries.
- Experience designing AI-powered products or flows that integrate LLMs explicitly.
- You're already familiar with Agent Experience (AX).
- Open source contributions, public design content, talks, or workshops.
- Comfort reading or discussing technical decisions with engineering (for example, frontend patterns, performance, or technical constraints).
- Experience helping hire and mentor other designers.
Working at Skyward lets you push your limits, challenge the status quo, and collaborate with smart, motivated people.
We are:
- Builders — We're solving real problems with cutting-edge technology, seeking to generate lasting impact worldwide.
- Owners — We love making an impact and improving our users' lives. We build and deploy state-of-the-art AI/ML solutions.
- Nerds — Curiosity drives us. From the edge to AI, we always look for what gives us an advantage.
- Ambitious — We believe this is a global problem and to solve it we need a global solution and an elite team.
- Human — We value the "human in the loop". Skyward is designed to empower people, not replace them, and it only makes sense if it improves the experience of those who use it.
Send us your CV and a brief note about the most challenging or interesting thing you've built to:
careers@skyward.ai.
Feel free to attach your GitHub, portfolio, or anything else you consider relevant.