Head of Design

We are defining a new category, and a new category has no visual or interaction vocabulary to inherit. You'll need to help define it. When execution is cheap, the quality of the product, its taste, its thoughtfulness, and its ability to direct human attention to what matters most are what create trust and make people come back. As the design leader, you'll have ultimate responsibility for making every interaction with our product as intuitive and effective as possible. THE ROLE The Design Leader is a senior design voice with well-formed, opinionated taste, who raises our bar in how we serve our customers and also delivers on that vision. Beyond being an industry leader in your craft, you are curious, excited about how the industry is changing with AI, and our mission to turn humans and agents into high-performing teams resonates deeply with you. You'll do two jobs at once. 1. Make the product wow. Our product is already powerful and innovative; we use it ourselves all day long. But the way it shows up doesn't yet reflect the power behind it. You'll bring it to life so customers feel that same power, with clarity and ease. We're looking for broad thinking across design and product, plus industry-defining strength in at least one area, such as UX and UI, brand, or the physical product, that you take far beyond what anyone else can imagine. In the AI era, that depth lets you push and influence every other area. 2. Build the machinery of design. To scale, SageOx lets everyone ship to production independently, which often means non-designers make design choices. You'll build the harnesses, tooling and guidance that let humans and agents follow your taste without your direct involvement. Beyond that, you'll help define what design means in the AI era: how we talk about it, the storytelling, how we attract designers, and how we build for designers. What you'll shape - Product: Ox Console, Ox Desktop and Mobile apps, onboarding for multi-person teams - Design system: components, tokens and guidance that both humans and coding agents use - Agent experience: how agents discover and experience us - SageOx in the real world: the Ox Dot, packaging, unboxing, onboarding, gadgets, the meeting-room experience - Brand: the visual brand language and the brand system for features and products - Marketing materials: website, social media visuals, event marketing You'll work closely with the founders to turn their vision into a strong visual experience, while adding your own ideas and pushing us further. This role will have great influence over the adoption of our product and, ultimately, the success of the company. Over time, you'll build out and manage the Design team. WHAT DESIGN LOOKS LIKE HERE You'll own design not through direct control or authorship of every feature, but by building the system: the harnesses, rules, design systems and approaches that drive how agents and humans roll out features you've never even seen, built so you're comfortable with that. - No throwing design over the wall. Design comes from everywhere: engineers, marketers, founders and agents all ship design decisions every day. Your job is to make those decisions good, not to gatekeep them. - Builders, not mockup makers. Planning and vision matter, and they'll be yours, but this role also requires execution. Everyone at SageOx builds, collaborates and delivers to production. - The harness is everything. The future of UX is likely deeply personalized: more of what people use every day will be unique to them. When no two users see the same thing, the system that shapes the experience matters more than any single screen. - Build toward where the models are headed. Foundation model builders are investing heavily in distilling taste into models. We're betting that within 12 months, foundation or specialized models will often have better taste in writing, design, art and music than many of the most accomplished people in those fields. As a leader at the very edge of a rapidly changing field, you should be prepared for, and excited by, tremendous change. The ground will shift under your feet constantly, and you'll give up significant control in exchange for achieving what was impossible before. If you'd rather define the future than look away from it, we should talk. WHAT YOU'LL DO Learn - Lead or observe design-partner sessions, analyze customer data patterns, and watch real teams use SageOx with their agents. - Map where people get lost, where they stop trusting what agents did, and where they light up. - Stay plugged into where AI and design are heading three to six months out, not where they were three months ago. Evangelize - Raise the bar: push the thinking and ambition of the team and the founders, with prototypes rather than decks. - Connect with startups in your ecosystem and advocate for SageOx, both the company and the product. - Be a voice in the industry on how design is changing in the AI era, through writing, talks and the work itself. - Tell the story of design at SageOx so great designers want to join us. Build - Ship to production yourself from week one: designs and code, not just mockups. - Make SageOx tangible in the real world, from the Ox Dot's packaging to the first day in the room. - Build self-serve design tooling, such as agent skills, so teammates stop queueing for a designer. - Champion the designers who use SageOx. We build for multidisciplinary teams, and your own experience and recommendations will push us hardest on the features and scenarios we build for designers. Experiment - Run many small design experiments against real usage, with an explicit keep or kill for each. - Prototype interaction patterns for human-agent teams before anyone has a name for them. - Use AI tools hands-on every day, and use SageOx to run your own design work. YOUR FIRST 30 DAYS - Day 7: Shipped at least one wow moment to production that customers notice, used SageOx with your own agents every day, and sat in on customer sessions. - Day 14: Shipped more wow moments, put the first design rules or harness in the hands of agents and teammates, and shared a point of view the founders hadn't considered. - Day 30: Seen features you never touched ship through your harness and design system, run your first design walkthrough for the team, and named the area where you'll take us furthest. HOW WE'LL MEASURE SUCCESS We measure outcomes, not output or portfolio polish. - Customer pull: design-driven experiments with a keep or kill decision, and the qualified signups and retained teams they move. - Ambition raised: decisions where your push changed what the founders chose to build. - Leverage: how much of the team's design work ships through your system and tooling without waiting on a designer. - Talent: the designers you attract to SageOx, and how fast they ramp. WHO YOU ARE Non-negotiables - Mission alignment: you want to help turn humans and agents into high-performing teams. - Daily, hands-on AI fluency: you design and build with agents now, not someday. - Strong, opinionated taste, and the courage to tell the founders when they're aiming too low. - An industry reputation as someone other designers look up to, and rock-star depth in at least one area, with the range to play across all of them. - A builder and collaborator: you ship to production and work side by side with engineers, founders and agents. - Deep connections to the local startup ecosystem and to the emerging practices of design in AI-pilled teams. Experience - A track record of leading design at a high-bar product team, including building the system around design, not only the screens. - Work you can show where design changed what a product became. - Comfort spanning digital and physical products, or the curiosity to learn fast. - We value what you've done in the last year over titles. A rock star in 2026 looks different from one in earlier years. You're driven by curiosity, courageous in experimenting, and humble in success. LOCATION AND HOW TO APPLY This role is in person. San Francisco is our first choice, and you'll help us build out our SF team. Seattle, where we're headquartered, is our second choice.