Founding Designer
NYC, Onsite
Overview
Our client, a New York–based fintech company building an AI-driven platform for asset management, is hiring a Founding Designer to define how the product and company are visually remembered. This is a rare opportunity to own design end-to-end at a company building a category that's still visually undefined — shaping the visual language for AI in finance and setting the standard for how the brand shows up everywhere.
This is a hybrid role spanning both brand and product, with more weight toward visual craft.
Who They Are
Our client is a fintech company building an autonomous AI platform for asset management — not a chatbot, not a search engine, but a system that replicates how analysts and investment teams think: parsing datarooms, building investment theses, underwriting deals, stress-testing models, and executing complex, multi-step workflows for asset managers.
The platform reasons over a financial institution's proprietary data, internal models, IC notes, and emails alongside real-time market data to support the last-mile investment process. The company deploys finance and AI experts on-site to customize the product for each client desk's specific workflows, delivering autonomous AI analysts that build IC-ready investment memos and portfolio analysis. The company's clients include global asset managers and sovereign wealth funds.
What You'll Own
- Brand system: Define and evolve the company's visual language — typography, color, motion, and iconography — so every touchpoint feels distinctive
- Every brand surface: Website, social, decks, out-of-home campaigns, editorial content, product, and more — you own how anything seen externally looks and feels
- Product storytelling: Collaborate with marketing and product teams to turn complex systems into clear, high-signal visuals for launches, reports, and narratives
- Product craft: Partner with product and engineering to raise the visual bar across the core product and turn complex systems into clear, high-signal interfaces
- Visual standard: Build templates, libraries, and systems that let others execute at your level; final design output runs through you
Who You Are
Required
- Strong portfolio demonstrating exceptional visual craft across brand or product: polished UI, typography, layout, hierarchy, originality, and clear taste
- Ability to design seamlessly across web, digital, print, motion, and presentation formats
- Proficiency in motion design using tools like After Effects, Rive, or equivalent
- Strong sense of taste — able to dissect a brand, identify what's actually special about it, and argue for the unconventional direction with conviction
- Proficiency in Figma and modern AI design tools (e.g., Jitter, After Effects, Claude Code, image generation tools)
- Obsessive attention to detail
- Ability to consistently ship high-quality designs at speed
Strong Differentiator
- Prior startup or design agency experience with B2B brands
- Experience contributing to or extending design systems across product and marketing surfaces
- Based in NYC or willing to relocate
Why Join
- Early stage, high ownership: The product is live, product-market fit is real, and the category is still undefined — you'll shape what the company becomes, not refine what already exists
- High velocity: Ideas move from concept to product in days, not quarters — true 0→1 building
- Strong team: Work closely with a small, high-caliber team of engineers, investors, and operators from leading technology, finance, and investment firms, alongside former founders and international competition medalists
- High standards: A team culture with zero tolerance for mediocrity and high expectations for every member
Compensation & Logistics
Base salary range of $100–150K depending on experience, plus equity/stock options. This is a full-time, on-site position based in New York.