UI Product Designer
About Us
Proton is building the AI operating system for wholesale distribution, embedded in the workflows that move nearly every physical product on the planet. Distribution is a $9 trillion industry running on software that has been stuck for decades. We unify CRM, PIM, eCommerce AI, and Order & Quote Entry AI into one platform with one data layer and one AI brain, so reps spend their time on customer relationships instead of data entry.
We hire people with high agency and high urgency. Everyone here is a builder who owns problems end to end and ships AI-native software faster than anyone else in the category.
The median Proton customer reports 3x profit return per dollar spent and an extra day of sales per rep per month. Hundreds of distributors run on Proton, from family-owned shops to publicly-traded enterprises. We're backed by Felicis Ventures and Battery Ventures.
The Role
We're hiring a UI Product Designer to own how Proton looks and works. Reporting to the VP of Product, you'll ship in a squad with PMs and engineers, and you'll be in front of customers constantly, watching reps use what you built and bringing back what you can only learn in person. Our product people know their users by name, not through a research summary.
Those users sit in one screen for eight hours a day and have spent their careers with software they merely tolerate. We want them to have something they'd choose: fast, modern, a pleasure to use. That's the hard version of the job, because most of the UI patterns you'd reach for by default were drawn for software that couldn't think. Ours can.
Two things make this role different from a standard product design opening:
- You're an AI-native designer, not just a Figma operator. Everyone here uses Claude Code and similar agentic tools as a first-class collaborator. We expect concepts prototyped in real code, put in front of people, and iterated with heavy AI leverage. Prototype before you polish, and make the calls AI can't.
- You set the craft bar. This hire decides how Proton looks and feels. Distribution software is famously grim and we intend to be the exception. You'll own the visual language and the design system across all four products.
Location: Cambridge, MA (hybrid, 3 days a week in Harvard Square) or remote in the EU.
Level: Product Designer through Senior Product Designer. Scope and autonomy change across that range.
Compensation: $80k – $100k base depending on experience, plus bonus, equity, and full benefits. EU offers are benchmarked to local market.
What You'll Do
- Prototype in code with Claude Code or Cursor to feel an interaction before we commit
- Own the design system: components, interactions, documentation, and the harder part, getting every squad to use them.
- Define what AI looks like here. Nobody has settled patterns yet, so you'll decide what it looks like when a rep trusts an agent and when they overrule one.
- Work inside our agentic scrum model. We don't run two-week sprints; cadence follows what a team and its agents can ship, and you'll help work out what design looks like in that.
- Get in front of customers constantly, including onsite. Distributors work in warehouses and on sales floors, and the best design calls come from standing next to a rep.
Requirements
- Craft that is demonstrably yours. Command of typography, layout, color, hierarchy, and iconography, with motion when it earns its place. You pull references from well outside software, and your work looks like someone made it rather than assembled it. We are explicitly not hiring people who let AI make their taste decisions. AI amplifies taste, it doesn't create it.
- Real end-to-end delivery. Shipped products, real users, real ownership, alongside PM and engineering. Hands-on work, not an LLM-generated portfolio.
- Daily, hands-on use of AI in your practice. Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent, used to ship real work rather than generate comps. You can say concretely how you structure context and check what comes back.
- A portfolio. Products or features you took from concept to launch where you set the visual language yourself. We're most interested in a workflow you found trapped in a legacy system and reimagined: what you kept, what you threw out, and how you got people to move.
- Systems thinking. You can author one beautiful screen and write the rules that let others make fifty consistent ones. You are curious enough to understand what's cheap to build and what isn't.
- Real agile experience, and a pull toward customers. You've worked inside traditional scrum and know what those rituals were for. We've replaced it with an agentic scrum, and knowing the original is what lets you help rebuild it. You'd also rather be in the room with a user than briefed about them.
Big Plus
- Complex B2B, enterprise, or ERP-adjacent software, with high-frequency users and workflows people can't opt out of.
- Agentic products, and the patterns for trust, correction, and handoff between a person and an agent.
- Early-stage SaaS startups.
Benefits
- Competitive salary + company stock options — we want you to feel like an owner.
- Flexible schedule with high autonomy.
- Unlimited PTO + 10 company-paid holidays.
- 12 weeks fully paid parental leave (primary and secondary, including adoption and fostering).
- Annual company-paid offsites.
Proton.ai participates in the E-Verify program: Notice of E-Verify Participation, Right to Work.
