Founding Product Designer

Founding Product Designer Compensation: $0–$200K base + equity (0.5% target) Location: New York City (Brooklyn, 5 days/week in office) Work Policy: On-site only Sponsorship: H1B transfers considered only for exceptional candidates Stage: Seed-stage legal AI startup | $10M funding | Founded 2025

Who Are We? We’re a Sequoia-backed legal AI startup reinventing how in-house legal teams operate. Today, legal work is slowed down by scattered knowledge—buried playbooks, hidden contract language, and institutional context lost in inboxes and shared drives. We’re building a context management system that surfaces the right insight at the right time, transforming legal from reactive bottleneck to strategic enabler.

Founded by engineers with legal backgrounds, including a former lawyer and legal ops leader with multiple prior startups, we’re early—but already have paying customers and strong design partners. We’re building with urgency and intention.

This is not a polish-the-dashboard role. This is defining the design DNA of the company.

What’s in It for You? You’ll be the Founding Design Partner—owning product design from the earliest stages and shaping how modern legal software looks and feels.

You’ll work directly with founders and engineering to define UX principles, product philosophy, and visual language.

You’ll design complex B2B desktop workflows and turn them into intuitive, low-cognitive-load experiences.

You’ll have real equity (target ~0.5%) and meaningful influence over company trajectory.

You’ll operate in a high-conviction, fast-moving environment where strong talent is given autonomy and trust.

Relocation assistance up to $10K available for the right candidate.

What Will You Do? Lead the end-to-end design process: user research, flows, interaction design, visual execution, and system-level thinking.

Own the next iteration of the product—improving existing early features and building critical new flows such as onboarding (currently does not exist).

Create and maintain a scalable design system to support product growth.

Simplify complex legal workflows into clear, elegant desktop-first experiences.

Collaborate closely with founders, engineering, and go-to-market teams in sprint-based cycles.

Conduct user testing and rapidly translate insights into product improvements.

Shape Sandstone’s visual identity across product and brand surfaces.

Contribute to early product strategy discussions with a strong point of view grounded in first principles.

What Will You Need? 5+ years of experience designing and shipping polished, high-quality products.

A world-class portfolio demonstrating exceptional interaction design, visual craft, and systems thinking—particularly for complex B2B desktop applications.

Founder or founding-team experience, or strong early-stage startup experience with high output.

Time at a gold-standard, design-led company (e.g., Linear, Notion, Figma, Stripe, Superhuman, Dropbox, Airbnb) or equivalent design rigor.

Deep understanding of user-centered design and a sharp eye for typography, hierarchy, spacing, and clarity.

Strong visual taste with a minimalistic, low-cognitive-load approach.

Comfort owning hands-on execution in an IC capacity—this is not a management-first role.

Ability to move quickly, ask sharp questions, and demonstrate genuine interest in legal tech and startup building.

Nice to Have Front-end skills (React familiarity helpful but not required). Active engagement in the design community. Experience simplifying enterprise workflows.

We’re looking for someone who obsesses over craft, thrives in ambiguity, and wants to build something foundational—not someone optimizing marketing pages or managing a team from day one.