Senior/Lead Product Designer

You should join koodos labs for the people and our mission.

We aspire to build the best team of the 2020s. Just like PayPal in the 90s, Google in the 00s, and Stripe in the 10s, we want to be known as "a place where it's good to be from." If you join us, we promise to be the best place to grow your career — with the best people you've ever worked with. We’re also working on a very bold mission.

We care deeply about helping people connect more deeply with themselves and others. And in the spirit of personal empowerment, we aim to invert the internet's data model over time and put individuals in control of their digital identities.

We’re building Shelf. It's a digital shelf that updates as you consume content online. You can control what shows up on your shelf, and see when people you know are watching, reading or listening to the same thing. And it's built on top of infrastructure that allows you to reclaim control over your consumption and interest data, and provision third-party access to it to personalize experiences without compromising your privacy.

We’re looking for an experienced, thoughtful product designer to join our founding team and help bring this vision to life.

In this role you will:

We’re early stage, so you'll have an outsized equity stake and an unparalleled opportunity to shape the product direction.

We’re a small, but mighty team with backgrounds in big tech, as startup founders and as early members at successful startups. We’ve come together around a shared vision and are dedicated to creating important and positive experiences for cyberspace.

We're well resourced (unannounced rounds) & backed by top-tier investors, including the backers of companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, Snap, and Twitter, as well as the founders of companies like Zynga, VSCO, and Scale and the people behind artists like Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, Lorde, Logic, and Panic! At The Disco, and many others. Our team is advised by the founders of Pinterest, Dubsmash (now Reddit), as well as pioneers of digital marketing and market design from Harvard.

We care about building a genuinely diverse team. We are a majority-first gen immigrant team and sponsor visas — we think that’s important as we build towards enabling easier digital migration. We share the same values of individuality, empathy, reliability, kindness and humility. One big overlap among our life experiences is contrasts: contrasts between our own upbringing and the world around us, contrasts between what was expected of us and what we ended up pursuing and our bringing together of contrasting, interdisciplinary worlds.

More about us here.

You’re likely a good fit if you:

Consumer product design experience: You should have significant experience designing consumer product experiences, and you should be familiar with UX best practices. We’ll want to learn from your experiences, so you should have a perspective on what makes consumer product experiences magical.

Five+ years experience: As a small startup, there’s a lot of room for growth but not a lot of bandwidth for direct design mentorship. We’re prioritizing candidates with 5+ years in design. We use Figma for most things, and Spline for 3D modeling — although don’t expect extensive experience with these tools (Spline was founded in 2020 ).

Team: You are a designer who wants to design great products and contribute to a great team. At koodos labs, we know that early teammates set the culture years into the future. You should be committed to the startup journey, have a perspective on what makes great design and what makes a great team — and you should care deeply about holding both product and teams to a high standard. We are an in-person team in New York and believe that being together IRL is an important part of setting the right pace, level of collaboration and culture early on.

Ownership: You’re ready to take end-to-end responsibility for product design. You know what makes a frictionless user experience, and you’re excited to collab with engineering to bring your designs to production.

Learning: You are comfortable building early-stage products and taking action with imperfect information. The market is changing rapidly, and we need to respond to change without running in circles. You should be comfortable adapting rapidly while remaining focused on a goal.

Individuality: You bring a unique perspective to the team. We want anyone in the world to be able to use our products, so we approach diversity and inclusion seriously and thoughtfully. We recognize that bringing together different perspectives and backgrounds helps build stronger teams and products.

Startup Experience: You know that building great companies takes a lot of work. Seed-stage companies can offer some of the most challenging, invigorating, and rewarding experiences in tech — quite simply, koodos labs is different from Big Tech. It helps if you’ve experienced the ups and downs of startup life before, but so long as you’re excited for an adventure, we’re excited to have you join.

Here are some quotes from team members around what they want to see:

Day 1: You’ll talk to your first user alongside our UXR lead and get the lowdown on masterplan + roadmap.

Day 7: You’ll make your your first contribution to our design files. We believe in learning-by-doing, so you’ll likely jump right in and make a small change to a page or feature, and pass it onto engineering during our sprint planning session. We’ll make sure you have support at every step along the way.

Day 30: You’ll assume responsibility for end-to-end design, be a core contributor to our sprint planning sessions and on roadmap prioritization. We have an ownership culture, so as soon as you’re familiar with user needs, our product and roadmap, we’ll put you in charge!

In the Future: You’ll become a senior leader at koodos labs, either as a people manager or an individual contributor. We expect the early team to grow into high-impact roles as the company scales.

We lean heavily on prior experience, demonstrated ability, and references.

Interviews: We start the interview process with a discussion to hear more about your prior experience and goals, and to tell you more about koodos labs.

If we both think there’s a potential fit, we’d be keen to understand your product design experience a little better. If you have a thorough portfolio that we can look through, we’ll share that around the team. If we feel like it’d be helpful to get a deeper sense for your experience, we may ask if you can record a <10 min Loom video (or similar) talking through a specific project you worked on that demonstrates your product design skill and how you prioritize. We’re looking for a case study, and for you to tell us about your process and give us the behind-the-scenes. Several members of the team will watch the video to get to know you better before we proceed. ​

The 2nd interview would then be a 45-minute free-flowing whiteboarding session in Figma on your feedback on Shelf. No prep needed! This’ll give us both a sense of what it’s like to jam! We’ll move straight into final stage onsite after this.

Onsite: We’ll invite you to meet the team at our office in West Soho! It’ll be a series of discussions with team members and an opportunity to grab lunch with us We think it’s important for you to get a feel for what it’s like to collaborate with the team.

References: After the interview stage, we ask for 2-3 references who would be willing to discuss their experiences working with you. We will also likely reach out to other folks that you’ve worked with in the past, so please do let us know if there’s anyone we shouldn’t reach out to. We’ll make sure to be respectful of their time; most calls take about 15 minutes. And we also offer you the opportunity to reference check us!

Decision: This part’s on us, and we promise to move fast.