[Hiring] Founding Designer @Breathe for Change

Role Description

You'll be our first design hire. You'll own how Breathe for Change looks everywhere a prospective student meets us, and you'll make it yourself: the website, the curriculum made visual, email, paid-social creative, event materials, brand. The heart of it is making a complicated thing legible: a 30-credit, three-semester master's and a five-layer Human Intelligence framework, explained visually, in a sequence a tired teacher can follow in one scroll.

This is a making role. You design in Figma and you build what you design, in Webflow, Framer or front-end code. Direction comes from our growth lead and our exec team; the craft, the system and the shipped work come from you. There is a mountain of hands-on design to do, and we'd rather hire one person who can do it beautifully than a director who can't.

Your first big project is already scoped: a refresh of our website, borrowing the clarity of the best program sites in education while keeping our brand. You design it. You build it. It's the fastest way for both of us to see what working together is really like.

We don't have a product engineering team yet, so product design here starts with the student-facing surfaces we already ship: onboarding, program materials, the theme and content of the learning platform our partner college provides, and the dashboards and AI tools our team runs on. The first one is student onboarding. As we build more of the student experience, you're the designer in the room from the start, and because you build, you'll ship a good deal of it yourself with AI-assisted tooling and our technology lead on the plumbing. It's not the core of the role, but the information design you do on the website becomes the design language for everything a student touches.

Three things to know about how we work, because they tell you whether this seat is for you:

• You'd be making, not managing.
• We're small, flat and fast.
• We sell a regulated degree with integrity, structurally.

What you'll actually do:

• Bring the brand and curriculum to life.
• Design and build the website.
• Design email.
• Design the ad-creative system.
• Design the student surfaces we ship.
• Carry the brand into everything.

Qualifications

• Someone who explains complicated things visually.
• Someone who builds.
• A senior generalist.
• Performance-literate.
• Fluent in the tools.
• A writer by necessity.

Requirements

• 7+ years designing for consumer brands, ideally with a stretch as the first or only designer somewhere, or a freelance practice with real clients.
• You've shipped marketing websites you built yourself, in Webflow, Framer or code, and you can show us which parts you built.
• You've designed email and paid-social creative with the numbers in front of you, and changed what you made because of them.
• Figma, one site builder, basic video editing. Motion is a plus.
• You can shape a headline and cut a paragraph in half, and you'd rather cut than add.
• You show work early, ask for the number, and change your mind when the data says to.

Benefits

• Base salary: $130,000–$165,000 for US-based candidates, depending on experience and the depth of what you've shipped; adjusted by location elsewhere.
• Stock options.
• Health, vision and dental insurance.
• 401k and FSA/HSA eligibility.
• Unlimited PTO.

How to apply

The application asks for three live sites you built, one piece where you explained something complicated visually, one email or ad, and five sentences on what you'd cut from one of our pages. Those matter more than your résumé, and we read every answer.

Breathe for Change is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.