# Job Description Pack: Founding Product Designer **Company:** [Stealth AI Startup] -- AI-Powered Contract Review for Legal Teams **Stage:** Seed ($3M raised) | 6 people | First design hire **Prepared:** March 2026 --- ## PART 1: INTERNAL ROLE SCORECARD > This scorecard is for the hiring team only. It defines what success looks like, how to evaluate candidates, and what tradeoffs the team is making by hiring this profile. --- ### Role Summary | Field | Detail | |---|---| | **Title** | Founding Product Designer | | **Reports to** | CEO (former lawyer, domain expert) | | **Collaborates with** | 3 Engineers, CEO | | **Comp range** | $140K-$175K base + 0.5%-1.25% equity (4-year vest, 1-year cliff) | | **Location** | Remote-first (US) with quarterly on-sites | | **Start target** | Within 60 days of offer | --- ### Mission of the Role Own every pixel and every interaction of the product experience, from first-contact research with legal teams through shipped, production-quality UI. Establish design as a strategic function inside the company, not a service desk. Build the foundational design system, research practice, and visual identity that will carry the company from seed through Series A and beyond. --- ### 12-Month Success Outcomes These are the measurable results that define whether this hire was successful at the 12-month mark. **Quarter 1 (Months 1-3): Foundation & First Wins** 1. **Ship a redesigned core review workflow** -- Complete end-to-end redesign of the primary contract review experience (document upload, AI-flagged clause review, redline export) that measurably improves task completion rate among pilot users by 20%+. 2. **Establish a lightweight design system** -- Deliver a working component library (in Figma + code-ready specs) covering typography, color, spacing, core UI components (tables, document viewers, annotation layers, status indicators) that the engineering team actively uses. 3. **Complete 8+ user research sessions** -- Conduct and synthesize interviews/observations with practicing attorneys, paralegals, and legal ops managers. Produce a shared insight repository that the CEO and engineering team reference weekly. **Quarter 2 (Months 4-6): Depth & Differentiation** 4. **Design and ship 2 net-new product surfaces** -- Extend beyond the core review flow to design at least two additional major features (e.g., clause library management, team dashboard with review analytics, batch review queue) from concept through production. 5. **Reduce time-to-value for new users by 40%** -- Redesign the onboarding and first-run experience so new legal teams reach their first completed contract review significantly faster, validated by product analytics. 6. **Create the company's external design identity** -- Deliver brand guidelines, marketing page designs, and product screenshots/assets that the CEO can use for fundraising and sales conversations. **Quarter 3 (Months 7-9): Scale & Systems** 7. **Demonstrate design-driven product direction** -- Originate at least one major product bet (feature, workflow, or pivot) based on research insights that gets prioritized and shipped, proving design is a strategic input, not just an execution function. 8. **Achieve a measurable usability benchmark** -- Establish and hit a target System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 75+ across the core product, with a structured plan to reach 80+ by end of year. **Quarter 4 (Months 10-12): Maturity & Leverage** 9. **Build the case for (or against) a second design hire** -- Produce a clear assessment of what design work is bottlenecked, what a second hire's profile should look like, and a recommended org structure for a 2-3 person design team. 10. **Product is demo-ready for Series A** -- The product's design quality is at a level where it actively helps close enterprise deals and impress Series A investors. CEO can demo the product without apology. --- ### Required Competencies (Scorecard Criteria) Rate each candidate 1-5 on these dimensions. Minimum threshold: average of 3.5, no single score below 3. | # | Competency | What "Great" Looks Like | Weight | |---|---|---|---| | 1 | **Information-dense UI design** | Has shipped complex, data-heavy professional tools. Can make a screen with 40+ data points feel calm and scannable. Understands progressive disclosure deeply. | Critical | | 2 | **End-to-end ownership** | Portfolio shows work from early research sketches through final shipped pixels. Not just "visual design" or just "UX research" -- genuinely full-stack. | Critical | | 3 | **Domain complexity tolerance** | Has designed for expert users in complex domains (legal, finance, healthcare, engineering). Understands that simplicity in expert tools is not about removing features. | Critical | | 4 | **Speed and scrappiness** | Can go from problem to testable prototype in days, not weeks. Comfortable shipping 80% solutions and iterating. Doesn't need a perfect process to do great work. | High | | 5 | **Visual craft** | Pixel-level attention to detail. Typography, spacing, color, and hierarchy are noticeably polished. Portfolio has at least 2-3 pieces that make you say "that's beautiful." | High | | 6 | **Systems thinking** | Builds components and patterns, not just pages. Thinks about how design decisions compound. Has built or contributed to a design system before. | High | | 7 | **User research fluency** | Can plan, conduct, and synthesize qualitative research. Comfortable talking to unfamiliar users (lawyers) and extracting actionable insights. | Medium | | 8 | **Written communication** | Can write clear design rationale, async design reviews, and user-facing copy. In a remote, small team, writing is a primary communication tool. | Medium | | 9 | **Technical empathy** | Understands frontend constraints. Can discuss implementation tradeoffs with engineers without needing a translator. Has shipped with engineers directly. | Medium | | 10 | **Comfort with ambiguity** | Thrives when requirements are vague. Can self-direct, figure out what to work on next, and create structure where none exists. | High | --- ### Candidate Filters (Knockout Criteria) These are non-negotiable. If a candidate fails any of these, they are a no-hire regardless of strengths elsewhere. - **No portfolio of shipped product work.** Agency/concept work alone is insufficient. We need evidence of designs that went to production and were used by real users. - **No experience with complex/professional tools.** If their portfolio is exclusively consumer apps, social products, or marketing sites, the transition risk is too high for a sole designer. - **Cannot work without a design manager.** If the candidate asks detailed questions about design review processes, design leadership mentorship, or structured career ladders, they likely need more organizational support than we can provide. - **Needs a full research team to do research.** If they describe research as something "the research team handles," they won't succeed here. We need someone who does their own research. - **Rigid process dependency.** If they describe their design process as a fixed sequence that can't flex, they'll struggle with our pace and ambiguity. --- ### Anti-Patterns to Watch For | Signal | Risk | |---|---| | Portfolio is 90%+ visual/brand design | Will struggle with complex interaction and information architecture problems | | Describes ideal work environment as "collaborative design team" | Will be lonely and unproductive as a solo designer | | Never mentions constraints, tradeoffs, or failures | May not have operated in resource-constrained environments | | Can't explain why users do what they do | May be a "pixel pusher" without genuine user empathy | | Asks about design ops, DesignOps tools, or headcount plan before understanding the product | Optimizing for the wrong things at this stage | --- ### Interview Process (Recommended) | Stage | Format | Duration | Evaluator | Focus | |---|---|---|---|---| | 1 | Portfolio review (async) | -- | CEO + 1 Engineer | Craft, complexity, shipped work | | 2 | Intro call | 30 min | CEO | Motivation, culture, communication | | 3 | Design exercise (take-home) | 3-4 hrs | CEO + Engineering | Problem-solving, speed, information hierarchy | | 4 | Working session | 90 min | CEO + 2 Engineers | Collaboration, technical discussion, iteration | | 5 | Reference calls | 2-3 calls | CEO | Verification of independence, quality, speed | **Design Exercise Prompt (recommended):** Give candidates a real (anonymized) screen from the product -- a dense contract clause review interface -- and ask them to redesign it in 3-4 hours. Evaluate: Did they ask clarifying questions? Did they handle information density well? Is the output production-quality? Did they articulate tradeoffs? --- ## PART 2: PUBLIC JOB POSTING --- # Founding Product Designer **[Company Name]** | Remote (US) | Seed Stage | $140K-$175K + Meaningful Equity --- ## We're building the operating system for contract review. Legal teams spend 60% of their time reviewing contracts. They scroll through 40-page documents, flag risky clauses from memory, and track changes in email threads. It's slow, error-prone, and miserable. We're fixing this. We've built an AI-powered contract review tool that reads contracts the way experienced lawyers do -- flagging risks, suggesting alternatives, and cutting review time by 70%. We have $3M in seed funding, paying design partners at top law firms, and a founding team of 6. We're looking for our **first product designer** to own the entire user experience. --- ## What you'll do You'll be the design co-founder in all but title. There's no design system, no component library, no brand guidelines. You'll build all of it. Day to day, you will: - **Own design end-to-end.** From interviewing attorneys at their desks to shipping pixel-perfect UI. Research, wireframes, prototypes, visual design, interaction specs, QA -- it's all you. - **Design for information density.** Our users are experts who work with 40-page contracts, multi-column clause comparisons, and nested risk taxonomies. They need to see a lot of information and act on it quickly. This is not a "clean white space" design problem. - **Build the design system from scratch.** Create the foundational component library, typography scale, color system, and interaction patterns that will scale from seed to Series B. - **Conduct user research directly.** Sit with lawyers, paralegals, and legal ops leaders. Understand their workflows, tools, and pain points. Turn research into product decisions. - **Work directly with engineers.** No design-to-dev handoff theater. You'll sit in the code reviews, understand the constraints, and iterate together in real time. - **Shape product strategy.** You'll have a seat at every product decision. The CEO (a former practicing attorney) brings domain expertise; you bring user-centered design thinking. Together, you'll decide what to build next. --- ## 12-Month Outcomes If you're successful in this role, here's what the world looks like after 12 months: 1. The core contract review experience has been redesigned and shipped. Pilot users complete reviews measurably faster. 2. A working design system exists and the engineering team uses it daily. 3. You've conducted 30+ user research sessions and maintain a living insight repository. 4. You've designed and shipped 4+ major product surfaces beyond the core review flow. 5. New users reach their first completed review 40% faster than today. 6. The product's design quality actively helps close enterprise deals. 7. You've originated at least one major feature based on your research that shipped and moved a metric. 8. You've written the brief for the second design hire. --- ## What makes this role unique **The design-major spike here is information-dense UI for expert legal workflows.** This is not a consumer app. This is not a dashboard with 6 cards. Your users are lawyers who spend 8 hours a day in documents. They need: - Multi-pane layouts showing source documents alongside AI-extracted clauses - Dense comparison tables with 15+ columns of contract metadata - Inline annotation and redlining tools that feel as natural as Microsoft Word - Risk scoring visualizations that overlay onto 40-page contracts - Workflow state management across review teams and approval chains The closest design analogs are Bloomberg Terminal, Palantir, Figma, or Linear -- professional tools where information density is a feature, not a bug. If you've designed this kind of interface and loved it, keep reading. --- ## What's hard here (the honest version) We believe in radical transparency about what this role actually looks like day-to-day. Read this carefully. **You'll be the only designer.** There are no design peers to critique your work, no design manager to guide your growth, no DesignOps to manage your tools. You'll need to be your own critic, your own mentor, and your own project manager. This is freeing if you're self-directed. It's isolating if you're not. **Requirements will be ambiguous -- often.** We're a seed-stage company figuring out product-market fit. You'll sometimes get a brief that's a Slack message: "Lawyers need a way to compare clause libraries across clients. Can you figure out what that means?" You'll need to go from ambiguity to shipped UI without someone defining the requirements for you. **Speed over perfection, always.** We ship weekly. Sometimes daily. You'll need to be comfortable putting work in front of users that isn't finished. The designer who wants to polish every interaction for 3 weeks before anyone sees it will not survive here. **Legal is a complex, unsexy domain.** You'll need to learn about indemnification clauses, limitation of liability provisions, and change-of-control triggers. It's intellectually fascinating once you're in it, but it's not the kind of work that goes viral on Dribbble. **The CEO will have strong opinions.** Our CEO practiced law for 8 years. She knows this domain deeply and will push back on design decisions that don't reflect how lawyers actually work. You need to welcome that pushback, not resent it. The best outcomes will come from productive tension between her domain expertise and your design expertise. **Your impact is enormous, and so is the pressure.** As the only designer, every pixel in the product is yours. Every usability problem is yours to solve. Every visual inconsistency is yours to fix. This is the highest-leverage design role you'll find -- but the accountability is absolute. --- ## You should apply if you... - Have 5+ years of product design experience, with at least 2 years designing complex, information-dense tools for professional users (legal tech, fintech, devtools, healthcare, data platforms, or similar) - Can show a portfolio of **shipped products** (not concepts) where you owned the full design process from research to production - Have built or significantly contributed to a design system - Have conducted your own user research (interviews, usability tests, contextual inquiries) without a dedicated research team - Work comfortably with engineers, can discuss implementation tradeoffs, and have experience with design-to-code collaboration - Are a strong written communicator (critical for remote, async-heavy work) - Thrive in ambiguity and have evidence of self-directed work in early-stage or lean environments --- ## You should NOT apply if you... We respect your time. This role is genuinely not for everyone, and there's no shame in that. Please self-select out if: - **You need design peers to do your best work.** If your creative process depends on daily critiques, design team brainstorms, or a senior designer's feedback, this role will feel isolating. We'll get there eventually, but not in year one. - **Your portfolio is primarily consumer or marketing design.** Beautiful landing pages and mobile social apps are great -- but they don't demonstrate the information architecture and workflow design skills this role requires. - **You want clear requirements before you start designing.** If "figure out what this should be" feels stressful rather than exciting, the ambiguity here will be a daily frustration. - **You optimize for process over output.** If your instinct is to establish a 5-step design review process before shipping your first feature, our pace will feel reckless to you (and your process will feel slow to us). - **You haven't designed for expert users.** Expert tools have fundamentally different design principles than consumer products. Progressive disclosure means something different when your user has 8 years of domain training. If you haven't navigated this tension before, the learning curve on top of everything else is too steep. - **You want a design leadership role.** This is a hands-on IC role. You'll be in Figma 70% of the time, not in meetings or managing people. If you're looking for your first management role, this isn't it (yet). --- ## Compensation & Benefits - **Base salary:** $140K-$175K depending on experience - **Equity:** 0.5%-1.25% (common stock, 4-year vest, 1-year cliff) -- you'll be employee #7 at a company with $3M in funding and growing revenue - **Benefits:** Health, dental, vision insurance; unlimited PTO (we actually take it -- team averages 4 weeks/year); $2,500/year learning budget; $1,000 home office stipend - **Location:** Remote-first (US time zones). Quarterly team on-sites (usually 3 days in NYC or SF) --- ## How to apply Send us: 1. **Your portfolio.** We want to see 2-3 case studies of shipped products. At least one should involve a complex, information-dense interface. Show your process and your output. 2. **A short note (under 300 words)** telling us: What's the most complex UI design problem you've solved, and what made it hard? 3. **Your resume/LinkedIn.** Send to: [hiring@company.com] with subject line: "Founding Designer - [Your Name]" We review every application. You'll hear back within 5 business days. --- ## Our interview process | Step | What | Time | |---|---|---| | 1 | Portfolio review (async) | We review, no time from you | | 2 | Intro conversation with CEO | 30 minutes | | 3 | Design exercise (take-home) | 3-4 hours on your schedule | | 4 | Working session with CEO + engineers | 90 minutes | | 5 | References | 2-3 calls | | 6 | Offer | -- | Total candidate time commitment: ~6 hours across 2-3 weeks. We don't do all-day onsites or panel interviews. We respect that you have a job. --- *[Company Name] is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds and do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic.* --- ## PART 3: APPENDIX -- HIRING MANAGER NOTES ### Sourcing Strategy Given the specificity of this profile (information-dense UI + comfort with ambiguity + solo designer), broad job boards will produce low signal. Recommended sourcing channels: 1. **Direct outreach** to designers at: Palantir, Bloomberg, Everlaw, Relativity, Ironclad, Clio, Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, Kira Systems, Atrium. These companies have designers who already understand legal/professional tool complexity. 2. **Design communities** focused on complex tools: Information Design subreddits, Edward Tufte forums, Data Visualization Slack groups, Enterprise UX conferences (Enterprise UX, UX Copenhagen). 3. **Referral bonuses** ($5K) to the existing team -- small teams hire best from warm networks. 4. **Avoid** generic design job boards (Dribbble, Behance jobs) -- these skew heavily toward visual/consumer design and will generate high volume but low relevance. ### Compensation Benchmarking Context - Seed-stage founding designer roles in 2025-2026 typically range $130K-$180K base in major US markets. - Equity range of 0.5%-1.25% for employee #7 at seed is competitive; below 0.5% will signal the company doesn't value design strategically. - Be prepared to go to the top of the base range ($175K) for a candidate who hits all critical competencies -- this hire is worth compressing margin for. ### Red Flags From Past Founding Designer Hires (Industry Pattern) - Designer who "needs to understand the full vision" before starting work -- at seed stage, the vision changes monthly. - Designer who produces beautiful mockups but doesn't follow through to implementation -- at 6 people, shipped > designed. - Designer who frames their work exclusively in case studies about "the process" without showing tangible output -- process is a means, not an end. - Designer who has only worked at companies with 50+ person design orgs -- the support structure gap will be enormous. --- *End of Job Description Pack*