Founding Designer

Hey! We're team Granola 👋 If you haven't already, you should check out what we're building, and why you should work here.

We're looking for a designer to invent the future of AI-powered work tools. You’ll share in our obsession with making the most useful product possible, especially as we evolve Granola into a multiplayer, multi-platform tool that helps with much more than just notes.

Why This Role is Special

• Invent the future of software: AI is evolving at breakneck speed, and we believe half the "best practices" of tomorrow haven't been invented yet. If you're drawn to experimentation and pioneering new interaction patterns, you'll thrive here.

• Be the first full-time, in-person design hire: You'll shape Granola's design DNA. You won't just follow established processes; you'll create them, influencing everything from day-to-day design workflows to our long-term design culture.

• Join a design-forward founding team: Sam (co-founder) is a designer, and Chris (co-founder) is a second-time founder with product background. We get what it means to do design right, and you'll have full support to push for great user experiences.

• Work with kind, ambitious, and talented people: We've built an incredibly talented team of engineers, with product sense and empathy for our users. Building something that's actually useful is baked into the culture of the company.

In this role, you will:

• Design the future of Granola alongside the founders, Chris & Sam. You'll work on early feature definition and sit shoulder to shoulder with engineers to ship features and market them to the world.

• Level up the fit & finish of our product. People spend hours each day working inside Granola; we owe it to them to make it a beautifully crafted experience.

• Spend hours each week with users: investigating use cases, testing new features, and building your sense of what to build next.

• Prototype, test, iterate: Jump between "explore" mode (trying wild ideas, prototyping in Figma or code with AI tools like Cursor/V0) and "exploit" mode (perfecting promising features, nailing interactions, typography, and motion).

• Evolve our brand and design language, and make sure it's applied consistently across the product.

This could be a good fit if:

• You've spent at least a few years shipping beautifully designed products to real users. Think of this as a senior/staff-level role.

• You're a systems thinker who's worked on open-ended tools before, not just A→B flows. You understand that architecting a flexible system is as much the challenge as executing on individual features.

• You know when to be scrappy, and when to hone in on the details. When we're early figuring out features, speed of iteration is all that counts. As we build conviction in what we're building, it's sweating the details in interaction, typography, and motion that make all the difference.

• You're a natural prototyper: let's try it and see how it feels might be one of our most used phrases in the office.

• You're drawn to figuring out problems in code and the latest AI tools: staying on the bleeding edge of AI tools is a company value for us – it's important to make us more effective, but also to incorporate the best ideas into Granola.

• You measure your designs on what shipped, not a beautiful Figma file.

• You're comfortable working across platforms. We're building for Mac, iOS, and web, and it's important that Granola feels like a good citizen on all. An awareness of established patterns for each platform is important.

As a person, you…

• Are first and foremost a builder

• Are excited to work in-person from our office in London (most of the time)

• Love working in a startup environment (you either have experience working in a startup or are really drawn to the zero-to-one phase)

• Value working with people who are kind, ambitious, and pragmatic

About the Opportunity

We are living in the most exciting time for tool builders since Engelbart's demo in 1968. We want to assemble the best crew to build this future together, here in London. Our compensation philosophy is to pay slightly above market on salary and above market on equity.
We do our best work in person, and so our team spends time together five days per week in our new, bright, and spacious office at Old Street. We are happy to offer relocation assistance to candidates who’ll be moving to London to join us.
Lastly, we think amazing talent comes from all kinds of life journeys and experiences. If what is written above speaks to you, whether you look like a fit on paper or not, please reach out.