Principal Product & Brand Designer (m/f/x)

Job description

## **Build something that truly matters** At **Cortea**, we envision a world where every audit is proactively managed by **humans and AI agents collaboratively**. Where auditing professionals have superhuman capabilities at their fingertips to strengthen the trust in the world's most critical systems. We're not just improving auditing workflows, we're redefining how audits are done from the ground up. With a rapidly growing, global customer base and backing from world-class investors, the market is ready. What we ship next decides how big this gets. This is your chance to join a team of sharp, ambitious and kind builders extremely early. Shape the company at its pivotal moment and **build something that truly matters**. ## **About the role** At Cortea, design earns trust, and we sell to an industry that exists to produce it. Auditors are paid to be skeptical, and people judge quality by what they can see: the product, the website, the deck a partner opens in a boardroom, the newsletter someone reads with their first coffee. All of it is Cortea. This is a role for someone with great taste in designing software and AI systems. You'll find novel patterns for problems that haven't existed in software before, and you'll own how Cortea looks and feels to the outside world. Roughly **70% product, 30% brand**. The product work is deep, expert-facing and systems-heavy. As we are doubling down on design, you'll be working on taking the core flows to the next level. The brand work is yours to own outright: website, marketing and sales visuals, newsletter, event and content assets. It'll be on screen in a Big4 boardroom, in every customer's inbox, and on the wall at the events we host. A lot of surface for one designer, and all of it yours. We're not looking for someone to ask whether the logo goes left or right. We're looking for someone with opinions. ## **What you'll do** - Work directly with our founders, engineers, and customers to turn audit flows into intuitive, delightful interfaces - Work with [Jonas](http://linkedin.com/in/jonas-brinkhoff/?skipRedirect=true) on product design and design strategy overall - Own our brand designs and visuals - Evolve our visual identity and design system - Take increasing ownership of brand direction. Website, marketing and sales material, content and event assets - Help shape the product vision, roadmap, and user experience standards - Run usability tests, build user feedback loops, and bring a systems mindset to design decisions ## **You'll be great at this if you** - **Have product design experience in B2B / SaaS**, ideally in fast-moving startups. - **Think in experiences, not screens. With taste you can defend.** Product and brand are one surface; you can explain why details work, and you call out when they don’t. - **Want to create a unique brand, which auditors love**. Identify, marketing, web should be a draw, not a tax. Taste and passion matter more than volume. - **Can hold complexity without losing clarity.** You turn configuration-heavy, expert workflows into clear systems. - **Use AI without sacrificing quality.** You've worked out which parts of the job benefit from automation and which need your judgment. - **Work well in ambiguity.** You take rough direction and deliver great work without handholding. - **Have low ego.** Best idea wins. You give and take feedback without making it about you. Titles are fuzzy. If you're operating at principal level, or you're currently freelancing and curious rather than actively looking, talk to us anyway. ## **What you will get** - **Full brand ownership, shape how the product feels**. Work face-to-face with experienced founders and learn directly from customer insights. - **Real influence on strategy**. In a small team of excellent engineers and operators with high autonomy, you will shape product direction. Best idea wins, regardless of seniority. - **Fast, ambitious, and fun team**. Decisions get made in hours, not weeks. Rapid experimentation is the default. - **Meaningful equity and competitive salary**. You are one of the first to build this, and you share in the upside. - **A mission that matters.** Building intelligent systems for a $200bn industry from Berlin, with AI at the core ## I**nterview process** - **First Call** — Intro on what we do with [Liza](https://www.linkedin.com/in/liza-shaban/?skipRedirect=true) - **Second Call** — Portfolio walkthrough with [Jonas](http://linkedin.com/in/jonas-brinkhoff/?skipRedirect=true) - **Third Call** — Get to know our product and culture with our Co-Founder [Valentin](https://www.linkedin.com/in/valentinneumann/) - **On-site Day** — Meet our full team in our Berlin office and work on a real problem together with us.