[Hiring] Founding Product Designer @Conatus

Role Description

You are the founding product designer. You work directly with the founders and the founding engineer to build the product, take it to market, and improve it quickly from what real readers do.

• You will own the visual design and much of the UX, with genuine creative freedom over how the product looks, moves and feels.
• You will shape the experience from the first screen a reader sees to the moment they close a chapter.

What you will own:

• The reading experience: Typography, layout, the composer, streaming text, transitions, motion and the small details that make a digital product feel like a beautifully designed book.
• The wider product: Onboarding, discovering stories, the library, character interactions, episode endings, sharing and everything that surrounds the core reading experience.
• Prototyping and exploration: Taking rough ideas and turning them into something we can click, experience and test. You use AI and modern prototyping tools to explore quickly, but your taste determines what is worth keeping.
• Design quality in production: Working closely with the founding engineer to make sure what ships is as good as what was designed. You stay involved through implementation, test the real product and refine the details until they feel right.
• The design foundations: The visual language, interaction patterns and standards that future designers inherit.

We have strong product and design instincts ourselves, so this will be a close collaboration. We know how to give clear direction, make decisions quickly and leave room for the person doing the work to bring their own ideas. We expect you to push back when you think we're wrong.

You do not need to write production code. You do need to understand how digital products are built, prototype your ideas and care deeply about the quality of what ships.

Qualifications

• Exceptional visual and UX taste.
• Extremely strong typography.
• A real consumer product designer.
• Strong interaction and motion instincts.
• AI first.
• You prototype, not just design screens.
• Comfortable starting from nothing.
• Strong collaboration with engineers.
• Design judgement and independence.
• Genuine interest in consumer psychology.
• You want unusually broad ownership and a path to Head of Design as the business grows.

Requirements

• Non negotiable: exceptional visual and UX taste, strong typography, and a portfolio of real consumer product work that demonstrates both.
• Preferred: four or more years designing consumer products, experience at an early stage company, and having taken at least one product from concept to launch. None of these on its own will rule you out.

Benefits

• Salary: ₹35 lakh to ₹50 lakh depending on experience.
• Founding level equity, sized for an early design leader rather than an ordinary hire.
• Fully remote.