Staff Product Designer

Job description

OUR VISION: UNLOCK HEALTHCARE'S FULL CAPACITY Hospitals run on three things: their people, their beds, and their supplies… and all are still managed with spreadsheets, phone calls, and gut instinct. Vitalize is building the system that runs it all intelligently, starting with labor — the biggest cost (nearly 60% of a hospital’s P&L) and the hardest operational problem. We're building the labor and capacity operating system for health systems — forecasting demand, matching the right staff to it automatically, and coordinating patients across the hospital. The impact is real: we save hospitals millions in unnecessary labor spend, give clinical leaders back 10–20 hours every week, and are often the reason staff and leaders stay. This isn't a nice-to-have: our customers pay 5–15x more than legacy incumbents because Vitalize is mission-critical software their hospitals rely on every single minute. We've raised over $32M from top investors, and even our own customers. OUR VALUES We hire and grow everyone against the same four values. Each one comes from a real Vitalize story - interview with us to hear them! - 🚗 Push the Car. Step in regardless of role. We help wherever we're needed, own problems end to end, and don't stay in our lane. People can count on us. - 🏥 Premier 1K. We show up for our customers, always. Nearly everyone visits a customer site in their first month, and customer feedback informs everything we do. - 🗣️ Run Towards the Ugly. Name the ugliest truth first, then propose the fix. Candor over comfort — we call out what's broken, and never get complacent. This shapes our craft. - 💡 Think Bigger Fridays. See the gap, fill it — no permission required. Every decision is an experiment: we run it, let the results decide, and drive real impact from day one. And read more about our founder’s thoughts about building a team here: https://vitalize.care/blog/our-thoughts-on-building-a-team THE ROLE You'll be the third product designer at Vitalize, joining to scale how design operates across the company. This is a leading IC role; your impact is measured by what the rest of the team builds because of the infrastructure, patterns, and examples you ship. 1. You'll own complex product surfaces that cross pod boundaries. Recommendation surfaces, AI-driven workflows, data-dense decision-support tools that span the central staffing office, the unit manager, and the nurse. 2. You'll set the standards the team adopts. Taste documents. Pattern examples. Critique norms. The way design rationale gets written, the way design and engineering resolve disagreement, the way customer evidence shapes product moves. 3. You'll work directly with customers. Design at Vitalize starts with real workflows. You'll visit hospitals, observe how nurse managers and staffing offices actually work, and use that context to shape what we build. 4. You'll shape how the design team grows. Hiring loops, critique culture, onboarding patterns, and design operating principles. You’ll contribute input on who joins the team, how quality is maintained, and how design partners with product and engineering as we scale. 5. You'll set the pace for how Vitalize uses design systems: Components, tokens, patterns, contribution model, documentation, the relationship between Figma and the Tailwind codebase. Engineers are shipping correctly on their own, designers are shipping faster, and the average craft level of the product rising because of work you did. WHO YOU ARE - You have 8+ years of product design experience, ideally on complex, workflow-heavy B2B SaaS products. You've shipped real features to real users and can talk about the business impact of your work. - You've owned a design system or comparable infrastructure that other people built on top of. You've designed the contribution model, not just the components. You can talk about the tradeoffs you made. - You’re comfortable spending time in the field. You enjoy observing operational workflows firsthand and are willing to travel to customer sites regularly to understand the reality of how the product is used. - You have mature product instincts. When you see a crowded interface, your instinct is to question whether the workflow is right. You design workflow changes, not just UI improvements. The bar is whether your principle survives into the shipped product. - You're opinionated, evidence-backed, and direct. You form a point of view quickly, back it up with what you've observed in the field, and hold the line when you disagree with engineers, founders, or customers, all while building strong relationships. - You're customer-obsessed in practice, with an instinct for business outcomes. You can name the metrics your design moves were built to change and defend the bridge between the design and the metric. - You're AI-fluent. You've worked on a product surface where AI was doing real work, and you have an informed point of view on how AI should and shouldn't show its reasoning in a UI. - You're a multiplier from day one. You enjoy critique, mentoring, and infrastructure work because of what they make possible for others. YOU MIGHT NOT BE THE RIGHT FIT IF: - You're looking to be the head of design at a Series A; this is a senior IC seat with ownership, not a management role. - You've only worked on consumer products - You need detailed specs or PRDs to start designing - Your portfolio is concept-heavy and ship-light, or you can't point to a system someone else built on Experience in healthcare, logistics, financial operations, or similarly complex operational domains is a strong plus — the operating-model pattern in our product (expert-in-the-loop workflow automation, cost-aware recommendations, audit-trail integrity) translates directly. The domain is deep but learnable. WHY NOW You'd be joining a small design team at the moment it scales from co-ownership to a real function. You'll be the third designer to join the team — the staff IC who sets the bar and the pace for delivery. You’ll multiply the output of the entire design team, leading by example, and owning critical design initiatives. The patterns you set today — in the design system, in how we collaborate with engineering, in the quality bar we hold, in how AI shows its work to clinical staff under time pressure — will shape the product for years. You'd be working alongside founders who care about design quality and give the team real autonomy, and an engineering team that ships fast and wants to get better at building well-designed software. BENEFITS - Medical, dental, and vision insurance - 401(k) with company match - Flexible PTO - Unlimited travel budget to visit customer sites - Bi-annual company off-sites - Free meals in-office - $5,000 relocation bonus - Desk setup reimbursement - Commuter benefits - Monthly gym/wellness stipend - An awesome office in Jackson Square, steps from the water