UX Designer-in-Residence

Most UX roles look the same. You inherit a product, a design system, and a backlog of incremental tweaks. You ship features that already have PRDs. Your portfolio fills up with redesigns of flows that were already mostly fine.

That's not what this role is.

Philo is hiring a UX Designer-in-Residence to embed across our studio portfolio for 6-18 months, with the intent of spinning out as a founding designer at one of the companies you help build. You'll work across three to five early-stage ventures throughout your residency, doing the messy 0-to-1 work that determines whether a company has a product worth building.

We expect you to work AI-first. Lovable, Cursor, Claude Design, Figma Make; whatever facilitates designing and shipping working V1s in days. Our portcos are AI-native products, which means you'll also be designing chat interfaces, agent workflows, and copilot patterns that don't have settled conventions yet. That kind of design work is hard to get reps in anywhere else.

By the end of your residency, the goal is for you and one of our portcos to mutually choose each other: you join full-time as a founding designer with meaningful equity, and the company gets a design leader who already knows the product, the customer, the systems, and the team.

Why a Residency Model?

Rather than asking you to bet on a single early-stage idea before you've worked with the team, the residency lets you:

• Get hands-on with multiple portfolio companies across different industries and stages

• Learn Philo's playbook for taking ventures from idea to seed

• Build relationships with Philo's founders, partners, and operators

• Find a team you can make a confident bet on

About Philo

Philo Ventures is a Silicon Slopes-based venture studio that co-builds and invests in early-stage technology companies from concept to seed-ready spinout.

The Role

Working with Philo's in-house design lead, you’ll partner closely with founding teams within Philo's portfolio companies to quickly iterate through validation to product-market-fit. Beyond execution, you'll bring design thinking to founding teams that may not have a design voice yet — shaping how they frame problems, prioritize what to build, and communicate their product to early customers. Your work will move between research, design, and validation across multiple ventures simultaneously, with the expectation that one of those ventures becomes your full-time home.

What You'll Do

• Run lean user research on early-stage products. Customer interviews, concept tests, and lightweight usability studies. Use AI to compress the synthesis loop (transcripts, theme clustering, draft personas), but never to skip the conversations themselves.

• Translate research into product direction. Synthesize what you hear into customer journeys and clear product hypotheses the team can build against.

• Champion design thinking across the venture. Many founding teams are technical or business-first. You'll help teams ask better questions before jumping to solutions, and make design strategy a core input to early roadmap decisions — not a downstream deliverable.

• Design MVPs end-to-end. IA, flows, wireframes, interaction patterns, and visual design. The ventures will be at the stage where one designer owns the full surface, iterating quickly to an MVP.

• Prototype in code, not just in Figma. Use Lovable, Claude Code, or similar to get a working v1 in front of users ASAP.

• Design AI-native surfaces. Many of our portcos build around chat, agents, or generative components. You'll work through the patterns this generation of software is still figuring out: confidence display, error recovery, human-in-the-loop control, prompt scaffolding.

• Stand up early design systems. Good enough to ship and easy to evolve. Resist the urge to over-engineer them at the 0-to-1 stage.

• Collaborate with engineering on implementation. Pair with engineers, review builds, and make the product feel right rather than just look right.

• Contribute to the studio playbook. Codify what works in 0-to-1 AI design so the next venture moves faster than the last.

What You Bring

• Meaningful UX design experience, ideally including time at a startup or small in-house team where you owned more than one slice of the design process.

• The ability to bring design thinking to teams that don't yet have a design culture. You know how to earn a seat at the table and shape how a founding team frames problems — not just how they solve them.,

• Strong fundamentals across research, IA, interaction design, and visual design. You don't need to be a specialist in any one area, but you should be solid across the stack.

• AI-first prototyping fluency. You design in Figma Make and ship in Lovable, or similar. Working prototypes are how you think.

• Real customer research experience. You've conducted interviews, run tests, and synthesized findings into product decisions.

• A bias toward shipping. You'd rather get a usable v1 in front of users this week than perfect v1 in three weeks.

• Strong opinions on what good design looks like, paired with the humility to change them when the evidence demands.

• Comfort with ambiguity. Many of your projects will start with an unvalidated hypothesis and a blank canvas.

• Communication skills strong enough to influence non-designers, including founders who don't always know what they need.

Bonus Points

• Prior experience as a founding designer or early hire (employee #1–10) at a startup.

• You've shipped real production work using Lovable, Cursor, Claude Code, or similar AI coding tools, not just prototypes.

• Experience designing AI-native surfaces: chat interfaces, agent flows, copilots, or generative UI.

• Experience running design sprints or other structured 0-to-1 methodologies.

What We Offer

• A genuine path to a founding designer role. The structural intent of this role is for you to spin out with equity into one of our portcos once you and the team have chosen each other. We share that intent openly with founders so the option is real, not theoretical.

• Studio compensation. Competitive base and benefits.

• Multi-venture exposure. You'll work on more 0-to-1 problems in a year than most designers encounter in their careers.

• Direct mentorship from Philo's design lead, plus access to our partners, founders, and portfolio CEOs.

• Flexible PTO and a hybrid office schedule in the heart of Silicon Slopes.

Who Should Apply

If you love building 0-1 and want to be a founding designer but don't yet know which company, this role is built for you. If you've already founded once and want to design your way back in, this role is built for you. If you've been optimizing mature products and the new AI toolset has you wanting to build something from scratch instead of iterating on something existing, this role is built for you.

If what you want is a stable role on a single mature product team with a clear ladder to design management roles, that's a great career, but it isn't this one.