The posting
About Modern
Modern is an AI-native data and intelligence platform for commerce brands, and an ai Residency team that runs on it every day.
That second part matters more than it sounds. Our ai Residency team operates a portfolio of DTC brands using this exact platform: attribution, cohort analysis, media mix, creator performance, lifecycle. Every feature has already survived contact with real P&Ls and real clients before it reaches anyone else.
The Role
We've built something genuinely powerful. Now we want everyone to be able to use it.
The platform answers questions most tools in this category can't touch. Our engineering team built an engine with real depth. Sophisticated operators pick it up and don't want to work without it. That part is solved.
The opportunity is reach. Our market isn't only sophisticated growth teams. It's also the founder running an $8M skincare brand who knows their business cold and has never heard the word "incrementality." We want that person to get the same value from day one, and today the product assumes more context than they arrive with.
You're the first UX/UI Design hire. Your job is to make something powerful feel obvious, without making it any less powerful.
That second half is the hard part. The easy version of this role is to strip features out until it's simple. We don't want that. We want the depth fully preserved and the path to it made clear. Progressive disclosure, sane defaults, an interface that teaches you as you use it, and a first session that delivers a real answer before it asks you to understand anything.
What You'll Own
The product experience, end to end. Information architecture, core flows, onboarding, dashboards, data visualization, empty and error states, mobile. You'll audit what exists, decide what's broken, and make the case for the order in which we fix it.
Onboarding and time-to-value. The single highest-leverage surface in the product. A new user should reach a genuinely useful insight in their first session without reading documentation.
Data visualization. A large share of this product is charts, tables, and comparisons. Designing these well: what's the default view, what's hidden, what a number means without a glossary is a real craft, and it's central to this job.
Designing for AI interaction. Parts of the platform are conversational or agentic. The design patterns for this are still being invented industry-wide. You'll be inventing some of ours: how the system shows its reasoning, how it handles uncertainty, how a user knows what to trust and when to check.
A design system. The product has shipped fast and grown feature by feature, so patterns vary across surfaces. You'll build the components, tokens, and patterns that engineers ship against, so consistency stops being a per-feature negotiation.
The marketing site and brand. You also own how Modern looks to the outside world: the website, product marketing assets, the visual identity of the platform. The brand should look like it belongs to a company at the front of this category.
Research, at a scale that fits. You'll talk to users regularly. You have an unusual advantage here: our own ai Residency team uses the product for hours a day and will tell you exactly what's painful. Use them, but don't only use them. They're expert users, and your hardest design problem is the person who isn't.
What Success Looks Like
First 30 days: You've used the platform the way a customer does, sat with agency operators while they work in it, and delivered a clear-eyed audit of where new users get stuck and what we should fix first. We want the unvarnished version.
First 90 days: A redesigned onboarding and first-run experience shipped. The beginnings of a design system in place. A prioritized roadmap of UX debt with a clear argument for sequencing.
First 6 months: The core dashboards redesigned and shipped. Measurable movement in activation and time-to-first-insight. Design is a real function here, not a request queue.
First 12 months: A non-technical brand owner can sign up, get to value on their own, and keep coming back. The design system is what engineering builds from by default. The marketing site reflects the product's actual quality.
Who You Are
5+ years designing SaaS products, with shipped work you can walk us through. Not just the final screens, but the problem, the constraints, what you tried first, and what you'd change now.
You've made complex software approachable before. Analytics, BI, fintech, dev tools, ops platforms, anything data-dense. This is the closest thing to a hard requirement on this list. Consumer-app polish alone won't transfer.
You're fluent in data visualization. You have opinions about chart types, and you know why most dashboards fail.
You work in the AI landscape and use AI in your own craft. You're paying attention to how AI products are being designed right now, you have views on what's working and what's cargo cult, and you use these tools in your own process. We're not looking for someone who outsources taste to a model. We're looking for someone whose taste is sharpened by moving fast.
You're comfortable being the whole design function. No team to delegate to, no researcher, no brand designer. You scope, design, ship, and measure. You know what "good enough for now" looks like and when it isn't.
You can build a case. You'll be advocating for design investment to engineers and leadership who have competing priorities. Strong visual work isn't enough. You need to explain why it matters in terms of activation, retention, and revenue.
You prototype. Static mockups only get an idea so far. Whether it's Figma prototypes, code, or AI-assisted, you show rather than describe.
Bonus Points
- You write front-end code (React/Tailwind) and can ship your own work or spec it precisely
- Experience with e-commerce, DTC, marketing analytics, or attribution
- You've been the first design hire somewhere and remember what you learned
- You've designed conversational or agentic interfaces
- Brand and identity work in your portfolio alongside product
Why This Role
A rare setup: a product that already works. You're not designing something speculative. The engine runs and customers rely on it daily. Your work goes straight into making it reach a much wider audience, which is the biggest growth opportunity in the company right now.
Users on tap. An in-house team of expert operators uses this daily and will give you unfiltered feedback. Most designers wait weeks for research; you'll get it in an afternoon.
Full scope. Product, system, and brand. If you've been boxed into one of those, this is the role that isn't.
Honest about the stage: this is a first UX/UI design hire at an early-stage company. Some weeks will be about refining what already ships rather than designing what's next, and you'll be building the function as you go. If that sounds tedious rather than satisfying, this isn't the right fit.
Benefits
Competitive salary
Competitive health benefits
Unlimited PTO
Health and wellness credit
Fully remote
A front-row seat at an AI-native company building the future of how brands and creators work together
