Founding Designer

We’re on a mission to make conversational AI agents think and respond at the speed of human conversation, everywhere they run. Today’s retrieval stack wasn’t built for real-time reasoning, so we’re building Moss: the real-time semantic search layer for conversational AI. Backed by YC, we’re making every AI product feel instantaneous, deeply personalized, and actually useful in the real world.

We’re looking for a Founding Designer to own the design across Moss, end to end. Product, brand, experience. You’ll define how Moss looks, feels, and communicates at every touchpoint - from the developer dashboard and docs to the website, pitch decks, and brand identity. Your job is to make Moss feel as fast and polished on the surface as it is under the hood.

This is not a “make it pretty” role. You’ll sit at the intersection of product, engineering, and GTM. You’ll shape how developers discover Moss, how they experience it, and how the brand shows up in the world. Design is a first-class function here, not an afterthought.

What You’ll Do

• Own the full design surface: product UI, developer experience, marketing, and brand.
• Design the Moss developer dashboard, onboarding flows, and core product interfaces.
• Build and evolve our brand identity, visual language, and design system from the ground up.
• Design our website, landing pages, launch assets, and campaign materials.
• Shape the developer experience visually: docs layout, code snippet presentation, error states, empty states, and loading patterns that make a real-time product feel real-time.
• Create pitch decks, investor materials, and sales collateral that tell a clear, compelling story.
• Work directly with the founders and engineering team to turn product direction into shipped interfaces.
• Establish design standards and a lightweight design system that scales with a small, fast team.
• Bring a strong point of view on what great developer tools look and feel like.

Must-Have Requirements

• 3+ years of professional design experience spanning product/UI and brand/visual design.
• A portfolio that shows range: product interfaces, brand systems, marketing, and web.
• Strong product design fundamentals. You can take a feature from problem to shipped UI with minimal hand-holding.
• Fluency in Figma and modern design tooling.
• Sharp visual taste and attention to craft. Typography, spacing, color, motion - the details matter to you.
• Bias for action, ownership mindset, and comfort operating in ambiguity.
• Clear communicator who can articulate design decisions to engineers and non-designers.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Experience designing for developer tools, infrastructure, or API products.
• Familiarity with design systems at early-stage scale - lightweight, flexible, opinionated.
• Motion design or interaction design chops. Micro-interactions, transitions, loading states.
• Ability to produce production-quality web assets using tools like Framer or Webflow.
• Experience at a YC company, early-stage startup, or in a founding design role.
• Familiarity with the AI/LLM ecosystem and how developers build with it.

Why Join Moss

• Design is a first-class function here. Not an afterthought. Not a service org. You shape the product.
• You’ll be the first designer. Everything you build becomes the foundation.
• Work directly with founders in a small, fast-moving, high-ownership team.
• Build at the frontier of real-time AI infrastructure and agentic systems.
• Strong engineering culture with a high bar for quality and speed.
• Competitive compensation and meaningful equity.