Studios · Open role
Turn a founder's intent into a product a stranger understands.
You work end to end across research, flows, interaction design, and the visual system. The job is to turn a venture founder's intent into a product a stranger can pick up without a walkthrough.
Mission
What the role does and why it matters here.
Studios builds companies alongside founders who already know their market: they bring the market truth, Studios brings the engineering and the build. You turn that founder's intent into a product a stranger can pick up without a walkthrough, working end to end across research, flows, interaction design, and the visual system. The design language usually doesn't exist yet when you arrive, so you set the patterns for a team that isn't fully hired. Spaces is the current public canvas; the role travels with whatever Studios backs next.
Responsibilities
What you would own.
Own end-to-end product design for one or more studio ventures: research, flows, interaction design, visual system, and the shipped screens.
Work directly alongside each venture's founder to translate first-hand market knowledge into a product a stranger can use without a walkthrough.
Set the design language for a venture early, often before it has its own design hire.
Move between ventures with very different registers, from a hospitality-adjacent consumer surface like Spaces to a private consumer-trust product, without losing craft or a founder's voice.
Prototype fast enough to test with real users before a venture over-invests in the wrong shape.
Partner with engineering so the shipped product matches the design intent, not a rough approximation of it.
Build the lightweight design-system infrastructure that lets a small venture team move fast without reinventing a component every sprint.
How you think and work
Six traits the work demands.
Pedigree isn't the filter. Disposition is. The six traits below are what the work actually asks of you.
Agentic intuition
You read agents the way a manager reads a direct report: when to trust the output, when to interrupt the run, when to take the wheel back.
You know when a layout is mostly right and when it's confidently wrong, and you can tell the difference before a user does.
Critical thinking
Confident-sounding output gets the same scrutiny as anything else, your own work included.
You've pushed back on a founder's favorite screen because the flow didn't support it, and won that argument with a better version.
Curiosity
You pull on threads. You read outside the lane. You follow a question past the first plausible answer.
You look closely enough at a venture's category, hospitality, dating, whatever's next, to design for how people actually behave in it, not how a mood board assumes they behave.
Agency
You move without being told. You decide, ship, own the call. No one has to write the playbook for you.
You've shipped the design that didn't exist yet because the venture couldn't wait for a full design team to be hired.
Systems thinking, long view
You see how the parts connect, and where this goes in three years.
You design a venture's first screen knowing its fifth feature will stress-test whatever pattern you chose today.
Leadership instinct
You orchestrate work across humans, agents, and stakeholders. You switch register between a workspace ticket, an architect call, and a senior bank room in the same day without losing what you came in to say.
You've kept a coherent product vision while a founder, an engineer, and a fast-moving roadmap pulled it in different directions.
Useful background
- You've taken a product from an early concept through to a shipped UI that real users touched, end to end, not just the mockups.
- You move fluidly between research, interaction design, and high-fidelity visual craft without waiting for a separate specialist at each stage.
- You've designed consumer-facing products where trust and tone decide whether someone stays past the first screen.
- You're comfortable working directly with a non-technical or solo founder, translating half-formed intent into a concrete direction.
- You can build and maintain a lightweight design system that a small team actually uses, not a component library nobody opens.
- You've shipped inside a small, resource-constrained team where you owned decisions with no one checking behind you.
- You've designed for hospitality, real estate, or another physical/consumer-trust category alongside a purely digital one.
- You've worked inside a studio, agency, or multi-venture environment carrying more than one brand's design language at once.
- You have a point of view on motion, type, or visual systems that shows up consistently across your portfolio.
- You've partnered closely with engineers rather than handing off a file and walking away.
Pedigree in your exact field isn't the filter. The disposition above is.
Logistics
How the role is set up.
- Location
- Remote-first. EU/CET overlap of at least four hours on a working day; Portugal hub for occasional in-person venture sessions.
- Engagement
- Contract or full-time.
- Start
- Rolling, coordinated once fit is confirmed.
- Language
- English; Portuguese welcome, not required.