The posting
About Sapiom
Sapiom is building payment infrastructure for AI agents. We enable agents to make purchases for people, manage payments between businesses, and buy the compute, inference, and APIs they need to operate. As agents become part of everyday life, we're building toward the experiences people will use to trust them with their money: one place to set what agents can do, see what they did, and stay in control across every agent they use.
Through one integration, Sapiom connects agents to funding sources and payment methods. Our intent verification checks that each transaction matches what the person or business authorized. Spending controls define where and how much agents can spend, with a record of every transaction and its outcome. We're building toward a world where people and businesses can delegate payments to agents with confidence.
We're a small team in San Francisco with deep experience in payments and infrastructure. Our founder was Director of Engineering in Payments at Shopify for five years. We've raised $50 million in our first 12 months from Accel, Dragonfly, Coinbase Ventures, Okta Ventures, Menlo Ventures and Anthropic.
About the role
Agents are starting to act and transact on their own. For that to work, people have to trust them, and most of that trust is won or lost in the experience. This is a chance to define what design means in a new era: the experiences that make the agentic economy work for people haven't been invented yet. You'll design for developers building on Sapiom today, and help shape consumer experiences that put people in control of the agents acting for them.
For now, you'll be our only designer. You'll own how Sapiom looks and works, working closely with our founder, product and engineering: deciding what design needs to happen, taking problems from a rough idea to shipped product, and setting the standard for design across the company. This is a high-autonomy, Staff-level role. The right person is a systems thinker who's fluent in how AI agents work, uses AI to explore and build at a speed that wasn't possible before, and has the taste to separate great work from generic output.
What you will do
Own the end-to-end design process across Sapiom's product: from early discovery and requirements gathering with Product, through iterative visual design, to guiding implementation with Engineering. You'll work on the hardest UX problems in agentic commerce, where there's no playbook yet, and make autonomous activity clear and trustworthy to the people behind it.
You’ll also help define Sapiom’s design language and how our brand shows up in the market. Product comes first. The goal: software that earns developer trust on first use and deepens it every time.
Responsibilities
- Own the full design process across product surfaces. Run design from early workshops and mockups to production-quality prototypes, delivering the right artifact at the right moment. Use AI to explore far more directions, prototype in code and automate the busywork, so your time goes to craft.
- Partner with Product and Engineering to shape strategic direction, not just execute on spec, bringing design thinking into roadmap conversations early. Frame the highest-value problems in agentic commerce based on what developers and users need.
- Ship interfaces for problems no one has solved before, across developer tools, consumer experiences and the conversations people have with agents.
- Design the moments where people decide to trust an agent, so they feel safe at a glance wherever they appear, including inside a partner's product.
- Build and maintain Sapiom's design system, and keep it consistent between Figma and code with an eye towards knowing when convention serves users and when a new pattern is necessary.
- Set the bar for design quality across the company by establishing shared standards and giving and asking for feedback with candor.
- Own Sapiom’s visual identity and support brand and marketing design when needed, so we become known for our design.
Requirements
- 8+ years designing software products that shipped, ideally in technical or financially complex domains (e.g. infrastructure, payments, fintech or security), including time as the sole or lead designer on a product. You've worked at Staff level, thinking in systems, not just screens, and taking big swings to raise the quality of what shipped.
- Exceptional visual, UI and interaction craft, and you’ve built or maintained a design system that engineers actually used. Your portfolio shows real products and the tradeoffs behind them, not just final screens. You have range beyond product, from a dense console to a polished consumer experience, a launch graphic or email.
- Exceptional taste. AI makes output cheap, so judgment is the job. You know the difference between work that's finished and work that's great, you hold the line on quality, and nothing generic ships on your watch. We don't ship AI slop.
- Fluent in AI design: you understand how LLMs and agents behave (and misbehave), design for people and the agents acting on their behalf, and use AI daily to prototype and explore, with proof it made your work faster and better. You have opinions on where the agentic economy is going.
- You move fast with engineering. You’ve worked where decisions happen quickly and product ships continuously, and you reach for quick prototypes over polished frames. You prototype in code and are comfortable opening small PRs to fix UI details yourself.
- Clear communicator who’s comfortable with ambiguity. You can make the case for a design in a Slack thread, care about the words on a screen as much as the layout, and change your mind when someone has a better argument.
- Nice to have: You've designed for money moving. That could be checkout, cards and wallets, banking or payouts, fraud and disputes, stablecoins, or developer payment tools. Bonus points if you've shipped in a regulated space where consent, disclosure and copy are part of the design.
Logistics
- Location: San Francisco in office five days a week.
- Reports to: CEO
- Start Date: ASAP
- Portfolio: Required with every application. Show us real work and the thinking behind it: early explorations, the tradeoffs you made and what shipped.
