Founding Product Designer

Job description

About Us Join us in building the leading AI-Powered Mission Control for Corporate Travel. Some of the world's most recognizable companies, representing over $4T in market value, rely on Clarasight's software to reduce risks, save costs, protect revenues, and manage emissions aligned with business objectives and sustainability goals. About You You think like a designer first and a product person close behind. You've been the design lead on a lean team with no thick PM layer — the one who talked to customers directly, framed the problem, designed the answer, and drove it into engineering. You set your own pace and don't wait for a spec to land on your desk. You care about craft and about the customer problem in equal measure, and you're energized by the chance to define something from the ground up rather than maintain what someone else built. About the Role This is our first dedicated design hire — and it's a high-ownership one. You'll own design craft and customer-facing problem-solving end to end, partnering directly with our Head of Product and a ~15-person engineering team. You'll establish the design system that brings our platform together, rebuild key flows as we modernize the product, and run your own discovery and validation with customers rather than waiting for direction. The role sits deliberately at the intersection of product design and product management: you'll flex across both, using strong design craft and sharp product instincts to find problems and fix them. As the team grows, there's a real path to specialize more deeply in either direction based on where your strengths take you. Key Responsibilities Design System & Consistency - Establish our design system. Build the foundational system in Figma — tokens, components, patterns, and usage guidelines — and roll it out feature by feature as we rebuild flows. You'll define it and partner with engineering to make sure it lives consistently in code. - Bring consistency to the platform. Create a cohesive look and feel across modules and features — color, typography, components, interaction patterns — so the product feels like one product. Feature Design & Prototyping - Design and prototype key features. Take features from concept to high-fidelity, interactive prototypes, moving fast in Figma and with AI-assisted design tools to get to something real and testable. We don't expect you to write production code. - Own discovery on solution paths. For the features you take on, run the solution discovery — understand the problem, explore directions, and make the call on the best path forward. - Translate solutions into clear PRDs. Work with the Head of Product to build documents engineering can build from. Customer Validation & Delivery - Validate with customers. Meet with customers directly to understand needs and pressure-test your thinking, and run UI/UX validation on releases — put designs in front of customers, gather feedback, and iterate. - Drive tactical delivery. Partner with engineering to ship, moving between focused areas of the product as priorities shift. You'll Be a Great Fit If You… - Have 5+ years of product design experience, ideally in B2B or SaaS, with a portfolio that shows strong visual and interaction craft. - Have established a design system — not just contributed to one — and know how to build the foundations and roll them out pragmatically on a real product. - Are comfortable owning the problem, not just the pixels: running your own discovery, talking to customers, and making product judgment calls when the direction isn't fully defined. - Can write clear requirements and partner closely with engineering to get work shipped. - Work fluently in Figma and Claude Design, and reach for AI-assisted design tools to prototype quickly. - Thrive in a lean, fast-moving environment where you set the pace and aren't waiting to be handed tickets. Nice to Haves - Experience designing for complex or technical platforms (enterprise, data-heavy, or workflow products). - Early-stage or small-team experience where you wore multiple hats. - Enough front-end literacy to collaborate fluently with engineers on how the design system gets implemented. - Experience working alongside AI systems and applying human judgment to automated outputs. Diverse Perspectives We know that innovation thrives on teams where diverse points of view come together to solve hard problems in ways that are just now possible. As such, we explicitly seek people that bring diverse life experiences, diverse educational backgrounds, diverse cultures, and diverse work experiences. Please be prepared to share with us how your perspective will bring something unique and valuable to our team.