Founding Product Designer

Agents are starting to sell, buy and operate on behalf of companies. But before an agent can close a deal, qualify an account, route a lead or assess risk, it has to answer a basic question: which company is this?

Today, that answer is messy, and no one answers it reliably. Business identity lives across CRMs, ERPs and third-party datasets full of duplicates, missing parent companies, stale addresses and incorrect enrichment. The cost shows up across the enterprise: sales teams miss revenue opportunities because they lack the...

Humans have worked around that mess for years. Agents cannot. They need a reliable business identity layer they can trust.

You’ll be Kernel’s Founding Product Designer, shaping how people experience Kernel and building a product they’ll love to use.
Your mission: simplify complexity. Make a powerful product feel effortless: clearer workflows, sharper mental models, fewer decisions, more confidence.
Own core UX end-to-end: flows, IA, interaction design, and visual craft.
Run ground-truth discovery: lead user interviews, synthesize fast, turn insight into shipped changes.
Prototype quickly: use whatever gets to a high-signal prototype (Figma, v0, Figma Make, code, etc.).
Ship with engineering + PM: tight loops, high quality in production, iterate fast.
Build the design foundation: principles, patterns, lightweight system - without slowing the team down.
5% “other stuff”: occasional help with decks/narrative when it moves the business.

Founding designer experience is a plus, but not a requirement - what matters most is that you have early-stage startup experience and can point to tangible examples of transforming a business through design.
You’ve shipped meaningful product work and can walk through decisions + outcomes.
You’re strong at simplifying complexity (not just polishing UI).
You can run discovery independently and get to the truth.
You move fast, communicate clearly, and collaborate tightly with engineers.
You have taste and execution: prototype → production details.
Need other designers to work best.
Need perfect clarity before starting.
Prefer long cycles and big “reveals.”
Want fully remote work (we move faster in-person).