Founding Designer

Job description

ABOUT CENTRALIZE Enterprise sales runs on relationships, and every tool built to manage them is a database from 2005. Reps lose seven-figure deals because they can't see who actually matters inside an account. We're building the system of intelligence that replaces the CRM. Centralize is the relationship intelligence platform for enterprise revenue teams. Webflow, Intercom, Brex, Cognition, LangChain, and Cresta use us to close their largest deals. We've grown 5x since last year, and customers are pulling us forward faster than we can ship. We just raised a Series A led by NEA, bringing our total funding to $18M+ alongside Salesforce Ventures, Y Combinator, and operators including Cal Henderson (Co-Founder, Slack), Noah Weiss (former CPO, Slack), and sales leaders from Figma, Box, Dropbox, Anthropic, and Notion. Centralize was founded by Rachit Kataria, a founding engineer on Facebook Shops who helped scale it to 250M MAUs, and Will Wang, who led the launch of Slack Huddles, the fastest-growing product in Slack's history. OUR BAR We stay small on purpose. No passengers, no politics, no waiting for permission or for someone else to fix what's broken. We own the unglamorous work alongside the exciting work. The 9pm customer request, the integration buried three layers deep, the bug nobody wants to touch. You go after it because it needs to get done, and because the next thing you build is better for it. You won't have the answers handed to you. The roadmap, the visual direction, the right call on a customer request, you'll be the one figuring it out. We hire people who are energized by ambiguity, not slowed down by it. Your work shapes what Centralize becomes. THE ROLE We are hiring our first designer. Enterprise software is a graveyard of bad interfaces, and we have a rare opportunity to build the product that proves enterprise tools can feel as good as the consumer software people actually love. As our Founding Designer, you will own how Centralize looks and feels everywhere it shows up. The product, the design system, the brand, the website, the marketing. You'll define the visual language for an entire product category from a blank canvas, and grow into the leader who builds the design team behind it. This role is well-suited to designers with serious visual taste and range, who think past the obvious solution, and who want full ownership of design at a company moving fast enough to use all of it. WHAT YOU WILL DO - Own product design end to end. The flows, the components, the interaction patterns, the system that ties them together. - Build and evolve our design system. Color, typography, spacing, components, made scalable enough that the next ten engineers ship fast without breaking the visual bar. - Own the brand. The identity, the voice, the way Centralize looks and feels across every surface beyond the product. - Design the marketing assets. The website, launch material, decks, and social, often the first impression anyone has of Centralize. - Talk to customers. Sit on sales calls, watch users navigate the product, and turn what you see into design decisions. - Set the standard for visual and craft quality at Centralize, and raise it every day. - Lay the foundation for the design team you will eventually help hire and lead. WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE - Week 1: First design shipped to production. - Day 30: Owning the design of a major product surface end to end, with the design system taking shape. - Day 90: The product and brand feel noticeably better than the day you joined, the design system is yours, and customers are commenting on the craft. WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR - A portfolio that makes the case for itself. We care about the work, not the resume. Show us the product surfaces, the brand work, and the details you've shipped. - Sharp visual taste. You can look at a screen and see what's wrong, and look at a blank screen and know what should go there. - Range across product design, design systems, typography, and brand. You move between a dense enterprise workflow and a marketing page without losing the thread. - The instinct to think past the template. You find the solution nobody else saw, and you can tell when the unexpected choice is the right one. - You don't stop at the static mockup. At minimum you prototype your designs to a high fidelity, and ideally you take them into code yourself, whether by hand or with tools like Claude Code. The dream hire ships their own work to production. - Excellent written and verbal English communication. You can explain a design decision in a doc, defend it in a meeting, and demo it to a customer. - Demonstrated ability to operate independently. We give you the goal, not the steps. THIS ROLE IS NOT FOR YOU IF - You want a team of designers around you to bounce ideas off. You will be our first designer, and the bar is set by you. - You want to work only on product, or only on brand. This role owns all of it. - You optimize for the perfect design at the expense of shipping. We grade on what's in production, not what's in Figma. - You want a slower pace. We work hard and move quickly. Please only apply if that excites you. PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS - Experience as the first designer or a design-leaning founding hire at a fast-growing startup. - Background shipping consumer-grade UI in a B2B product. Bonus if you've worked in CRM, sales tools, or other enterprise software categories. - Fluency building in code (React, modern CSS) and shipping your own designs to production. - Experience building and maintaining a design system at scale. - Brand or marketing design work that shows range beyond the product. - Interest in growing into a design leader and building the team. THE TEAM YOU'LL JOIN You'll work directly with Rachit and Will, alongside former founders and engineers from Coinbase, Gusto, Modern Treasury, and C3 AI. COMPENSATION AND LOGISTICS - Location: This role is open to remote candidates in the US, with a strong preference for candidates based in or willing to relocate to San Francisco or New York City. - Work Authorization: We are unable to sponsor visas. Candidates must have existing US work authorization. - Compensation: $170,000 – $240,000 base salary depending on level, plus 0.20% to 0.40% equity. Final offer calibrated to seniority and experience. BENEFITS - Fully covered medical, dental, and vision insurance - 401(k) - Parental leave - Unlimited PTO plus company holidays - Quarterly offsite - Equipment stipend