Founding Product Designer

Founding Product Designer

Y Combinator-backed AI company Amsterdam Full-time

We’re working with a Y Combinator-backed AI company building at the edge of what autonomous software can do.

The company is early, well-funded and already seeing serious commercial traction. But what makes this particularly interesting isn’t another story about putting AI into an existing category.

They’re building software that can understand a business, reason through complex problems and take action across the systems it uses.

As the underlying technology becomes more capable, the design challenge becomes much bigger too:

How do you make increasingly autonomous software feel simple, intuitive and trustworthy to the humans using it?

That’s the problem this person will own.

The role

They’re looking for a Product Designer to join an exceptionally small, technical founding team and take real ownership of how the product works and feels.

There is no large product organisation, established design function or neat backlog of screens waiting to be designed.

You’ll work directly with the founders and engineers, moving between product thinking, interaction design, prototyping and the actual product itself.

You’ll be designing around questions that don’t necessarily have established patterns yet:

• How should someone instruct an AI system capable of taking real action?
• How much of its reasoning should they see?
• When should a human intervene?
• How do you expose enormous technical capability without exposing enormous complexity?
• How do you create trust without adding friction everywhere?
• And how do you design software that increasingly adapts to the person using it, rather than asking the person to learn the software?

The interesting bit you’ll ship

This team has a pretty strong view on where product design is going.

The gap between designing software and building software is collapsing.

So they’re not looking for someone whose work ends at a Figma handover.

You don’t need to be a software engineer, but you should be genuinely excited about using AI-native development tools to get much closer to production.

That might mean building working prototypes, manipulating frontend components, experimenting directly in code, or increasingly shipping parts of the experience yourself.

The tooling will change. That’s almost the point.

What matters is that your instinct is to reduce the distance between an idea and a customer using it.

What you’ll own

You’ll have enormous scope across the product: defining core interaction patterns for AI-native software, making complex autonomous behaviour understandable, shaping how users configure and control intelligent systems, designing human-in-the-loop experiences, building new product surfaces from zero and establishing the foundations of the company’s design language.

Some problems will start with a clear brief.

Others will start with a founder saying, “we know this should be possible, but we have no idea what the interface should be.”

You should enjoy the second kind.

Who they’re looking for

We’re deliberately keeping the profile fairly open.

You could be a brilliant Senior Product Designer ready for much more ownership, or already operating at Staff level. You may have worked in AI, developer tooling, infrastructure, B2B SaaS or another technically complex product environment.

More important is how you operate.

• You have exceptional product taste , but you’re not precious about process.
• You can take something technically complicated and make it feel obvious.
• You think beyond individual screens and understand systems, behaviour and interaction.
• You’re comfortable with ambiguity and working directly with highly technical founders.
• You prototype early rather than polishing assumptions.
• You’re already using AI heavily in your work and are curious about what happens when designers can increasingly build for themselves.
• And you have the kind of agency where, when you see something that could be better, your first instinct is usually to make it better.

Why this role

• There are a lot of AI companies hiring designers right now.
• This is interesting because design sits unusually close to the fundamental product problem.
• The technology is becoming capable of doing more and more autonomously. The challenge is no longer simply whether the system can do something.
• It’s whether a human can understand…