Founding Product Designer

About Pluto

Pluto is building a vertically integrated, federally regulated market network for compute infrastructure. Our goal is to make raw computing power a financial asset class that can be traded, allocated, hedged, and secured with the same institutional rigor as other critical market infrastructure.

This is an early design role on a technical, regulated, and highly ambitious product. You will help define how institutional traders, enterprise operators, and regulators understand and interact with a new market category.

About the role

We are looking for a founding product designer who can turn dense financial and operational workflows into interfaces that feel clear, trustworthy, and precise. You will work directly with the founders, engineering team, and domain experts to design the first version of Pluto's product experience and visual language.

This role is broad by design. You will own product UX, high-fidelity UI, component systems, and parts of the company's external visual identity. The right person is comfortable moving from Figma components to onboarding flows, from data-heavy dashboards to regulatory-facing materials, and from ambiguous requirements to polished product decisions.

What you’ll do

• Design data-dense institutional interfaces for trading, onboarding, compliance, capital allocation, and operational dashboards.
• Create selected brand and communication assets, such as product diagrams, sales materials, investor/regulatory visuals, and internal design templates.
• Create and maintain a pragmatic design system in Figma, including components, states, typography, grid systems, iconography, and reusable patterns.
• Partner closely with engineering to translate design decisions into implementation details.
• Prototype high-fidelity product flows quickly so the team can pressure-test product hypotheses before committing engineering cycles.
• Simplify complex regulated workflows, including KYC/AML, permissions, account status, order and trade states, and audit-oriented user experiences.
• Conduct targeted usability reviews with founders, subject matter experts, and prospective users to refine unclear or high-risk workflows.

What we’re looking for

• 3+ years of product design, UI/UX, or visual systems experience; exceptional candidates with less experience but a strong portfolio are welcome.
• A portfolio showing complex interface design, data-heavy products, design systems, dashboards, developer tools, fintech, enterprise software, or similarly demanding workflows.
• Deep Figma fluency, especially component structure, variants, auto-layout, libraries, and documentation for engineering handoff.
• Product judgment beyond visuals: you think through states, empty states, loading, errors, permissions, edge cases, and asynchronous feedback loops.
• Comfort working with engineers in implementation detail without needing every requirement pre-written.
• Curiosity about financial markets, derivatives, infrastructure, AI compute, and regulated systems. Prior domain experience is helpful but not required.
• Bias toward ownership. At seed stage, you will often need to clarify the problem, propose the solution, ship the artifact, and improve it after feedback.

Please include a portfolio link with examples of past design work. We are especially interested in complex interfaces, component libraries, dashboards, enterprise tools, fintech products, developer tools, or data-heavy applications.

For each relevant project, we encourage you to explain the problem, constraints, tradeoffs, design process, and what changed as a result of your work. If available, please highlight a project where you owned the work from concept through launch.