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Quest are hiring a

Founding Designer

TL;DR

Were building an AI mentor that actually knows you and challenges you to grow. Just raised $6M pre-seed. Looking for a founding designer to shape everything with us in SF: product, brand, motion, visual identity.

Note

This job description was written by Claude Code, using our founders WhatsApp conversations and notes as context. We practice what we preach: building with AI.

Is This You?

Youve designed consumer products, and youve shipped a lot of them. Multiple apps. Multiple from-scratch problems. You move faster than most designers, not because you cut corners, but because you think in shipping, not in process. When you look back at a year of work, theres a lot to look at.

You dont wait to be told what to do. When you meet a founding team and hear their vision, you go home, open your laptop, and start making things. Not because you were asked to. Its just what you do.

You have opinions on what the product should look like, and you can defend them. Youre not waiting to be handed a visual direction. Youll help invent it.

You have an instinct for what makes a consumer product feel alive versus what makes it feel like another app. You probably have mental notes on why specific apps work and others dont. You think about this stuff outside of work.

And critically: you want to co-invent the product, not just execute it.

What Were Building

An AI that builds a deep psychological profile of you and uses it to push you to grow. Not a chatbot. A mentor. One that watches how you spend your time, understands who you are, and steps in when you need it, whether you asked or not.

The central design challenge: morphing UI. The interface literally reshapes itself based on each users psychology. Same app, completely different experience depending on who you are. Some users get daily nudges. Others get weekly deep reflection. Others get ambient, near-invisible coaching.

Nobody has built this. Theres no template to reference. Youll have to figure out what it should look like, feel like, and sound like. We want someone with opinions on where to start.

What Youll Own

  • Product design end-to-end: UX, flows, UI, micro-interactions, copy direction
  • The morphing UI system: an adaptive interface that changes per user psychology without feeling inconsistent
  • Onboarding: revealing an AI mentors capabilities in a way that feels like discovery, not a tutorial
  • Visual identity and brand: what does Quest look like? Youll define this. We have strong points of view; we want yours too.
  • Motion and feel: Quest should feel alive; transitions and feedback that make the product feel like its paying attention
  • Design culture: youll be the only designer for a while; you set the standard

Youre a Fit If...

You ship a lot. This is the thing we care about most. Not the most decorated portfolio, the most active one. Youve shipped more things in 3 years than most designers do in 10. You think in iterations, not in perfect versions. Youre slightly uncomfortable when you havent put something new in front of users recently.

You have both craft and product instinct, and we wont compromise on either. Exceptional visual quality matters. So does product thinking. Weve met designers who have one. We need someone who has both.

You have consumer instinct, wherever it came from. Mobile iOS, consumer web, social apps, games: products built for real people with real emotions. Your main job might have been at a B2B company, but youve been building consumer things on the side: a personal project, an AI experiment, an app you shipped because you wanted to. What matters is that the consumer lens is yours, whether you developed it at work or after hours. If your entire career is enterprise and youve never shipped anything for regular people, professional or personal, this probably isnt the right fit.

Youre a founding designer, not just a good designer. A good designer executes well. A founding designer carries the design of the company: sets direction, makes opinionated calls, gives you the feeling that this person has something we dont have. Weve un met good designers. Were looking for the one who gives us that feeling.

Youre proactive to an unusual degree. After a first conversation, youre the kind of person who goes home and comes back with a rough prototype, a redesign of something you noticed, a list of sharp questions. You do this because its who you are. That instinct is what were looking for above almost everything else.

Youre full-stack as a designer. UX, visual, brand, motion, website. No "thats not my lane." For a founding designer, there are no lanes.

You have opinions on the visual direction. Quests aesthetic doesnt exist yet. We want someone who shows up with a point of view on what it should be, not someone waiting to be briefed. Well shape it together, but we need you to bring conviction.

Preferred

  • iOS-native mobile experience: you know what it feels like to design for a platform, not just for a screen
  • Genuine curiosity about AI: youre interested in designing products where the system is the variable
  • Experience with behavioral or psychological design: how UX shapes what people do, not just how they feel
  • Background in social, health, personal growth, or any consumer vertical where emotional design matters
  • Youve experimented with AI tools for design: v0, Cursor, Figma AI, or anything that blurs the line between design and code; you have opinions on where they fall short
  • Bonus: youve gone directly into a codebase to fix a UI detail yourself, not because it was your job, but because waiting for a handoff felt slower

Seniority

We dont care about years or titles. If youre 1 year in and give us the coup de coeur, we want you. If youve run design at a Series B startup and youre the best person, we want you. Excellence over credentials.

Youre NOT a Fit If...

  • Youve only worked on enterprise or SaaS, with no consumer projects, professional or personal, to show
  • You want clearly defined scope, handoffs to engineers, and structured feedback cycles
  • Youd rather do one thing deeply than own the entire picture
  • You freelance or split time across projects: we need 100%
  • Youre not genuinely excited about this specific product and wouldnt use it yourself
  • Your instinct on a decision is to involve more people rather than make the call and iterate

Location

Were in SF and work together in person 4 days a week. Non-negotiable for the collaboration pace we need.

But were open globally. If youre in Paris, London, or anywhere else and genuinely ready to move to SF, we want to talk. Weve worked with EU candidates before and we gladly sponsor visas and help with relocation.

Why Quest?

Were two repeat founders who sold our first company to Google. Thomas (CTO) led an Android engineering team at Google and prototyped always-on AI wearables. Vincent (CEO) built some of Googles first AI agents: Jules (an async coding agent) and Stitch, an AI-first Figma competitor.

We left to build something that actually matters to real people.

As a designer, the opportunity here is specific:

Youll be working on a state-of-the-art AI product at a moment when this category is genuinely being invented from scratch. The morphing UI, the personalization engine, the onboarding that has to make an AIs intelligence feel like discovery rather than a tutorial: these are unsolved design problems. No prior art. No template to borrow from. What you design here will define how this type of product looks and feels.

What makes it possible is the engineering depth behind you. When you come with an ambitious vision, the answer wont be "we cant build that." Thomas and Vincent have shipped complex AI systems at Google scale. The gap between what you can imagine and what this team can actually execute is narrower here than almost anywhere else youll work. If youve ever had your best ideas quietly die in a backlog because engineering couldnt prioritize them, that wont be your experience here.

What you get:

  • Generous equity: youre employee #4 or #5 on a $6M-funded company
  • Competitive salary
  • Real creative ownership: nobody undoes your work in a committee
  • A 5-person team for the first year that moves fast and has no politics
  • Immigrant-friendly: work remotely from anywhere up to a month per year; we sponsor visas and green cards
  • Parent-friendly: 3 months fully paid parental leave; both founders disconnect 5-7pm daily for their kids

Weve met a lot of good designers. Were looking for the one who makes us feel like they have something we dont. If thats you, lets talk.