Founding Designer

TL;DR: We're building an AI mentor that actually knows you and challenges you to grow. Just raised $6M pre-seed. Looking for a founding designer to shape everything with us in SF: product, brand, motion, visual identity.

Note: This job description was written by Claude Code, using our founders' WhatsApp conversations and notes as context. We practice what we preach: building with AI.

Is This You?

You've designed consumer products, and you've shipped a lot of them. Multiple apps. Multiple from-scratch problems. You move faster than most designers, not because you cut corners, but because you think in shipping, not in process. When you look back at a year of work, there's a lot to look at.

You don't wait to be told what to do. When you meet a founding team and hear their vision, you go home, open your laptop, and start making things. Not because you were asked to. It's just what you do.

You have opinions on what the product should look like, and you can defend them. You're not waiting to be handed a visual direction. You'll help invent it.

You have an instinct for what makes a consumer product feel alive versus what makes it feel like another app. You probably have mental notes on why specific apps work and others don't. You think about this stuff outside of work.

And critically: you want to co-invent the product, not just execute it.

What We're Building

An AI that builds a deep psychological profile of you and uses it to push you to grow. Not a chatbot. A mentor. One that watches how you spend your time, understands who you are, and steps in when you need it, whether you asked or not.

The central design challenge: morphing UI. The interface literally reshapes itself based on each user's psychology. Same app, completely different experience depending on who you are. Some users get daily nudges. Others get weekly deep reflection. Others get ambient, near-invisible coaching.

Nobody has built this. There's no template to reference. You'll have to figure out what it should look like, feel like, and sound like. We want someone with opinions on where to start.

What You'll Own

• Product design end-to-end: UX, flows, UI, micro-interactions, copy direction
• The morphing UI system: an adaptive interface that changes per user psychology without feeling inconsistent
• Onboarding: revealing an AI mentor's capabilities in a way that feels like discovery, not a tutorial
• Visual identity and brand: what does Quest look like? You'll define this. We have strong points of view; we want yours too.

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• Motion and feel: Quest should feel alive; transitions and feedback that make the product feel like it's paying attention
• Design culture: you'll be the only designer for a while; you set the standard
  
  

You're a Fit If...

You ship a lot. This is the thing we care about most. Not the most decorated portfolio, the most active one. You've shipped more things in 3 years than most designers do in 10. You think in iterations, not in perfect versions. You're slightly uncomfortable when you haven't put something new in front of users recently.

You have both craft and product instinct, and we won't compromise on either. Exceptional visual quality matters. So does product thinking. We've met designers who have one. We need someone who has both.

You have consumer instinct, wherever it came from. Mobile iOS, consumer web, social apps, games: products built for real people with real emotions. Your main job might have been at a B2B company, but you've been building consumer things on the side: a personal project, an AI experiment, an app you shipped because you wanted to. What matters is that the consumer lens is yours, whether you developed it at work or after hours. If your entire career is enterprise and you've never shipped anything for regular people, professional or personal, this probably isn't the right fit.

You're a founding designer, not just a good designer. A good designer executes well. A founding designer carries the design of the company: sets direction, makes opinionated calls, gives you the feeling that this person has something we don't have. We've un met good designers. We're looking for the one who gives us that feeling.

You're proactive to an unusual degree. After a first conversation, you're the kind of person who goes home and comes back with a rough prototype, a redesign of something you noticed, a list of sharp questions. You do this because it's who you are. That instinct is what we're looking for above almost everything else.

You're full-stack as a designer. UX, visual, brand, motion, website. No "that's not my lane." For a founding designer, there are no lanes.

You have opinions on the visual direction. Quest's aesthetic doesn't exist yet. We want someone who shows up with a point of view on what it should be, not someone waiting to be briefed. We'll shape it together, but we need you to bring conviction.

Preferred:

• iOS-native mobile experience: you know what it feels like to design for a platform, not just for a screen
• Genuine curiosity about AI: you're interested in designing products where the system is the variable
• Experience with behavioral or psychological design: how UX shapes what people do, not just how they feel
• Background in social, health, personal growth, or any consumer vertical where emotional design matters

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• You've experimented with AI tools for design: v0, Cursor, Figma AI, or anything that blurs the line between design and code; you have opinions on where they fall short
• Bonus: you've gone directly into a codebase to fix a UI detail yourself, not because it was your job, but because waiting for a handoff felt slower
  
  

Seniority: We don't care about years or titles. If you're 1 year in and give us the coup de coeur, we want you. If you've run design at a Series B startup and you're the best person, we want you. Excellence over credentials.

You're NOT a Fit If...

• You've only worked on enterprise or SaaS, with no consumer projects, professional or personal, to show
• You want clearly defined scope, handoffs to engineers, and structured feedback cycles
• You'd rather do one thing deeply than own the entire picture
• You freelance or split time across projects: we need 100%
• You're not genuinely excited about this specific product and wouldn't use it yourself
• Your instinct on a decision is to involve more people rather than make the call and iterate
  
  

Location

We're in SF and work together in person 4 days a week. Non-negotiable for the collaboration pace we need.

But we're open globally. If you're in Paris, London, or anywhere else and genuinely ready to move to SF, we want to talk. We've worked with EU candidates before and we gladly sponsor visas and help with relocation.

Why Quest?

We're two repeat founders who sold our first company to Google. Thomas (CTO) led an Android engineering team at Google and prototyped always-on AI wearables. Vincent (CEO) built some of Google's first AI agents: Jules (an async coding agent) and Stitch, an AI-first Figma competitor.

We left to build something that actually matters to real people.

As a designer, the opportunity here is specific:

You'll be working on a state-of-the-art AI product at a moment when this category is genuinely being invented from scratch. The morphing UI, the personalization engine, the onboarding that has to make an AI's intelligence feel like discovery rather than a tutorial: these are unsolved design problems. No prior art. No template to borrow from. What you design here will define how this type of product looks and feels.

What makes it possible is the engineering depth behind you. When you come with an ambitious vision, the answer won't be "we can't build that." Thomas and Vincent have shipped complex AI systems at Google scale. The gap between what you can imagine and what this team can actually execute is narrower here than almost anywhere else you'll work. If you've ever had your best ideas quietly die in a backlog because engineering couldn't prioritize them, that won't be your experience here.

What you get:

• Generous equity: you're employee #4 or #5 on a $6M-funded company
• Competitive salary
• Real creative ownership: nobody undoes your work in a committee
• A 5-person team for the first year that moves fast and has no politics
• Immigrant-friendly: work remotely from anywhere up to a month per year; we sponsor visas and green cards
• Parent-friendly: 3 months fully paid parental leave; both founders disconnect 5-7pm daily for their kids
  
  

We've met a lot of good designers. We're looking for the one who makes us feel like they have something we don't. If that's you, let's talk.

Compensation Range: $200K - $250K