Founding Product Designer

Sydney (remote-first, hybrid preferred) · Senior to Lead · Contract-to-hire open

We are building an AI-powered Chemical Intelligence Platform for the $5 trillion chemicals industry. Enterprise customers use it to run complex workflows that used to take days or weeks: product recommendations, regulatory reporting, sales enablement, troubleshooting. The product turns vast technical documentation, research papers, and institutional knowledge into intelligent, searchable tools. An AI-powered assistant that actually understands chemistry.

Backed by investors behind Canva, Atlassian, Figma, and Robinhood. Around 25 people. Technical co-founders with PhDs in biochemistry and ML. Already live with global enterprise customers.

Design is the biggest bottleneck right now.

10 engineers, 1 offshore UI designer, product leadership covering design part-time. Work is reactive. No consistent process. No one owns the function. That changes with this hire.

This is a design leadership role in an IC seat. You will build and own the entire design function from scratch: how discovery works, how work ships, what quality looks like. Strategic scope, hands-on delivery.

What you will do

• Own UX across 10-14 parallel features. Users are domain experts (chemists, engineers, sales teams), not software people. There are no obvious UX patterns to borrow from here.
• Shape how humans interact with AI in a genuinely novel enterprise context. The design problems do not have precedent.
• Take messy, ambiguous briefs and turn them into clear flows and interfaces. Frame problems before solving them.
• Introduce just-enough process: when to skip design entirely, when low-fi is fine, when a full spec is needed.
• Work with the offshore UI designer and help evolve a code-based design system.
• Collaborate directly with the CTO, Head of Engineering, product leadership, CS, and customers. You push work forward without being asked.

What you bring

• Deep product design experience in B2B SaaS, ideally with complex data and workflows. You have built or shaped how design works at a company, not just delivered within someone else's structure.
• You have shipped in small, fast, sometimes chaotic teams. You know how to move across many features at once without losing quality where it matters.
• Strong product thinking. You frame problems before you solve them.
• Design systems literacy: tokens, components, coded systems.
• Communication that works equally well with engineers, product managers, and customers.

Nice to have

• Strong visual and UI craft
• Experience with AI/ML products or genuine interest in where AI is heading
• Background establishing design practice or systems from scratch

What is on offer

• $160,000 to $180,000 base + super
• Remote-first with Sydney office, hybrid preferred
• Minimal meetings. Real autonomy.
• Contract-to-hire available: work on a few real features first, commit later.

If you want to own the design function at a company building something genuinely difficult, with the trust to do it your way, let us talk.