Founding Product Designer

TL;DR: If you:

• have designed products that made complex technical work feel simple, fast, and almost obvious;

• want to invent the interaction model for AI agents that do real engineering work, not chatbots that answer questions;

• are equally comfortable talking to mechanical engineers, watching users struggle, and turning ambiguity into beautiful product surfaces;

• want to be the first product designer at a fast-moving Series A company building toward engineering ASI…

… you should apply for this role!

About P-1 AI:

At P-1 AI, we are building an AI engineer agent for the physical world named Archie. We maximize Archie’s anthropomorphism so that he fits seamlessly into existing engineering teams and workflows in the form factor of a human engineer.

Today, Archie performs at the level of a junior mechanical and electrical engineer, with intuition about product designs and the ability to use the same complex engineering tools that his human teammates use. His tech stack includes a custom agentic harness, structured design representation, continual skills learning, and small custom post-trained models using proprietary semi-synthetic training data sets which create a deep competitive moat.

Our ultimate aim is to build engineering ASI. We are backed in our mission by some of the top venture investors and AI luminaries.

About the opportunity:

This is a rare chance to define the product experience for a new category: AI agents that participate in real engineering work. Archie needs to understand goals, ask smart clarifying questions, use engineering tools, show his work, collaborate with humans, and earn trust inside high-stakes industrial workflows.

As our founding product designer, you will turn that capability into a product that feels legible, powerful, and inevitable. You will work directly with the CEO, AI engineers, product engineers, and design partners to shape the core interaction patterns, product architecture, and visual language of P-1 AI. Our design principles include: functionalism, density, explicitness, anti-minimalism, verbosity over opacity, and a timeless, unfashionable aesthetic.

About the role:

• Design the core user experience for Archie, including how engineers assign work, review results, inspect reasoning, compare alternatives, and share work back and forth with an AI teammate.

• Turn messy design-partner conversations into product flows, wireframes, prototypes, and crisp product decisions.

• Sit with users as they try Archie on real engineering tasks, watch where they get confused or skeptical, and redesign the experience until it clicks.

• Create prototypes that make abstract AI capabilities concrete for customers, investors, recruits, and internal teams.

• Build P-1 AI’s product design system, including interaction patterns, information hierarchy, visual language, and reusable components.

• Partner with frontend and AI engineers to ship product quickly, then tighten the experience through repeated cycles of user feedback.

• Help decide what Archie should expose, what it should hide, when it should ask for help, and how it should communicate uncertainty in high-trust engineering workflows.

About you:

• You have designed products for technical users where the underlying domain was complex, ambiguous, and/or expert-driven.

• You can show a portfolio artifact where you personally turned a confusing workflow into a product experience that feels clear and powerful.

• You are strong at interaction design, product architecture, prototyping, and visual craft.

• You are comfortable working from first principles when there is no existing product category to copy.

• You like spending time with users, especially when the feedback is messy, technical, or contradictory.

• You can move between low-fidelity sketches, polished mockups, written product thinking, and implementation details without losing momentum.

Location:

Remote (US/Canada) or San Mateo, CA. Remote employees spend one week out of six working together on-site in our San Mateo office. Relocation support available.

Benefits:

Competitive salary, meaningful equity ownership, healthcare, dental, vision, 401(k) match, and unlimited PTO.

Interview process:

• Initial screening call (30 mins)

• Biographical/behavioural interview (45 mins)

• Portfolio review and design interview (60 mins)

• Customer strategy interview (30 mins)

• CEO interview (30 mins)