Head of Design / Design Lead

Head of Design / Design Lead Most product design roles optimize screens. This one helps shape how global enterprises make strategic decisions. 🔍 What We Do FounderNest is building AI that changes how the world's largest organizations understand their markets. As Head of Design / Design Lead, you’ll define the product experience behind that intelligence, turning massive complexity into clarity for executives making high-stakes innovation, M&A, and strategy decisions. Design here is not decorative or downstream. It is a core input to product strategy. You’ll work directly with the founders as part of the core Product Trio , influencing product direction, customer experience, and how AI-powered workflows evolve across the platform. You’ll join at an inflection point: strong enterprise traction, rapidly expanding product scope, and the chance to define the design foundation for a company entering its next stage of scale. ⚡ Why This Role Exists As our customer base and product complexity grow, design is becoming central to how we scale usability, clarity, and adoption. We’re looking for a design leader who can elevate product experience, embed discovery deeply into how we build, and help shape how design operates as a function. 🎯 What You’ll Own Design Leadership: Lead and grow the design team, set standards, and define how design operates as the company scales. Strategic Influence: Partner in product decisions, shaping roadmap direction and representing user experience at leadership level. User Understanding: Stay close to customers through continuous discovery and translate complex workflows into clear product direction. Product Experience: Own usability and experience quality across the platform, ensuring every release improves clarity and adoption. Systems & Scale: Build and evolve design systems that support a growing, complex AI-native platform. AI-Powered Experimentation: Own the use of AI to rapidly prototype, test, and iterate on design ideas, accelerating learning cycles beyond traditional design timelines. 🧠 What You Bring 5+ years of product design experience at fast-moving, product-driven tech startups . Real product sense: you know what makes something valuable to a user, not just aesthetically clean. A track record of leading continuous discovery with users and the conviction to make it a team habit. Genuine curiosity about AI and technology , reflected in the tools you use and the questions you ask. Strong written and spoken English is a must. You'll be running discovery sessions with senior stakeholders independently. Spanish is a plus. 🧭 About You You care about solving meaningful user problems , not shipping features for the sake of it. You’re energized by ownership, direct feedback, and high-trust environments. You’re proactive, intellectually curious , and comfortable operating close to ambiguity without losing focus on outcomes . You want to help s hape how a company builds , not just contribute within an already-defined system. 🚀 What We Offer Growth and impact: Real ownership in shaping product, culture, and company direction. Competitive salary + meaningful equity. Flexible, outcomes-focused schedule. Unlimited PTO with team coordination. Full setup to do your best work. 90/10 Fridays: every other Friday for learning or personal projects. Off-sites and in-person collaboration opportunities. 🤝 Hiring Process Intro call: A conversation with our People Excellence team to walk you through the role and learn more about you and your experience. Design Case & Product Trio Session: You’ll work on a real-world design challenge, then join a live Product Trio session with our Head of Product and Tech Lead, simulating how we actually build together. Meet the team: Final conversations with key people across the company, including our CPO, Head of Customer Excellence, and the engineers behind the product. Excited by the challenge? We’d love to meet you and explore if FounderNest could be the next chapter in your journey. Department Product Design Role Lead Product Designer Remote status Fully Remote Employment type Full-time Our DNA & Values Our DNA: What drives success at FounderNest At FounderNest, we believe that the best teams are built on shared DNA traits . Here’s what makes someone succeed at FounderNest. 🤝 Humility without Egos : To listen, learn, adapt, and grow together, prioritizing collective success over personal recognition. There is always something new to learn from others! 🧠 Intellectual Ambition : To see challenges as opportunities and thrive in a team of brilliant minds. Always curious and resourceful, with a 10X mindset and first-principles thinking approach, we innovate, adapt, and ask: "What’s next? 🚀 Agency & Ownership : To be proactive, take the lead and hold the difficult conversations without being asked to, take initiative, embrace accountability, and lead and build with purpose in order to succeed in our high-performing environment. 👥 100% Team Player : To always make decisions with the team in mind, knowing that collaboration doesn’t just add impact—it multiplies it. Together we are stronger. 💪 Hard-Working : To go the extra mile with focus and passion while ensuring balance is maintained, fostering sustainable long-term excellence. ⚡ Outcome-Driven Mindset : To focus on making things happen—zero fluff, just real impact. It’s about owning results, moving fast, and focusing on what truly drives change. Our Values: CALIBER We pride ourselves on having built an open, humble, diverse, supportive, and truly unique culture that revolves around our seven values codified in the word CALIBER. 🎯 Customer Excellence : Our users have to experience excellence in all we do. Excellence attracts excellence. We hire people and technology smarter than us. 💨 Agility : Towards building adaptability to change and without compromising excellence. No analysis paralysis. A strong sense of urgency. We disagree and commit. 🙇🏼‍♂️ Learning : To constantly learn and give constructive feedback in any direction towards personal and professional growth. 🪄 Innovation : To lead through constant innovation that does not compromise simplicity. The impossible is possible. ⚖️ Balance : To not hesitate to go the extra mile when required and without waiting for someone to tell you. To also take time off any time you need it. 😇 Ethics : To be frugal and radically truthful and transparent and to never behave unethically. Cannot afford to die of success or arrogance. 🫂 Respect : To always suspend judgment and assume positive intent, to be compassionate, and to have no ego. We admit mistakes proactively, recognize others’ achievements, and are thankful and appreciative of them. About FounderNest Born at Stanford and Wharton , FounderNest is a gen-AI company that helps (today but with huge potential expansion opportunities) corporations in the world improve and streamline their market intelligence processes, including (for their spaces of interest): (1) helping them understand the taxonomy and dynamics of the space, (2) mapping out all the players, (3) getting unique insights about the space (e.g. growth rate, investment activity); and (4) tracking what their competitors are doing. Our core technology is built on real-time analytics running on private and public company data. This fuels our Natural Language Processing AI with +50M companies and +1.2B aggregated data points, allowing us to be 3x-5x better than alternatives. We are proud to count amongst our clients some of the largest corporations across a wide range of industries worldwide — for example, 4 of the Top 10 Pharma companies worldwide, two of the largest management consulting firms, one of the largest biotech companies, and one of the largest food & beverage companies in the world. Co-workers 30