About Adapt

Adapt is on a mission to make any company instantly AI native. We're the universal intelligence layer teams use to connect their existing tools, knowledge, and skills to the best model for the job — think Claude Code, but for the whole organization, not just one engineer. Every person shows up on day one with the context, tools, and skills already wired up, and the answers get sharper the more the company adopts and integrates. 

Early customers tell us Adapt is a 10x force multiplier for the team they already have — not a replacement for it. Thousands more companies are next.

About the role

We're hiring our founding designer to join the small, but cracked, product and engineering teams at Adapt. This is the design role at Adapt: you are capable of owning look-and-feel for the entire surface area — product, brand, website, docs, decks, social, every pixel a customer or prospect ever sees. We don't expect you to be a career specialist on both product and brand. We’re looking for someone who is capable and curious enough to move fluidly between a flow in the product, a wordmark, a marketing page, a launch video, and the system that holds it all together.

We are particularly seeking a designer who cares deeply about taste, craft, and shipping — someone who can sharpen the visual identity that got us here, build the design system that takes us further, and prototype (and ship) in code when that's the fastest way. We care about the craft (yes, we vibe a little too), and we want someone who can set the bar for what Adapt looks and feels like for the next decade.

About you

Years aren't all equal (startup years are like dog years, as an example) and they're not the best predictor of success. That being said, you probably exhibit most of these characteristics:

• 4-7+ years of professional design experience, ideally spanning both product and brand
• Experience working at an early stage (seed, Series A, Series B) startup, or a strong portfolio of personal/side projects that shows range
• Expertise in Figma, with fluency in modern prototyping methods
• Comfort writing front-end code — HTML/CSS/Tailwind at minimum, ideally React — and shipping your own work to production with engineers (or directly)
• A portfolio that shows real range: shipped product surfaces, brand identity work, marketing pages, illustration or motion, and a point of view on each
• Strong interest in many of the latest and greatest AI tools and models, and an opinion on what AI products should feel like
• Consistent track-record of design work that you drove end-to-end — from the customer problem through the final shipped pixel
• Ability to break down a vague, ambiguous problem into something concrete and shippable (you may have found yourself saying "the fastest way to decide this is to prototype it")
• Care deeply about users — you've got receipts of customer-driven design decisions, and when something you designed frustrates someone, you feel it
• A genuine desire to grow the craft of design and product-building (you could call it "taste"), with an eye for the little big details across type, color, motion, copy, and information density

How you'll be successful

As the founding designer at Adapt, you own design end-to-end — from the customer Slack thread, through exploration and shipping, all the way to the launch blog post and the social posts (we call it "ship and tell"). Your job isn't done until customers love what you built and the way it looks and feels. As we scale, you'll own and grow the design function. Concretely, you're responsible for:

• High-quality execution. This is the central responsibility of any designer. You design, prototype, and ship surfaces — product flows, brand systems, marketing pages, launch assets — that just feel right.
• Shipping frequently. You ship boulders (like product surfaces and brand systems), stones (smaller polish passes and component upgrades), and pebbles (icon tweaks, copy fixes, alignment nits) regularly and consistently.
• Owning the look and feel of Adapt across every surface. Product, marketing site, docs, decks, social, swag, the office. If a customer or prospect sees it, you've shaped it. You set and hold the bar.
• Building the design system. Not a Figma library that nobody uses — a real, code-backed system that the engineering team (and coding agents) reaches for by default, and that lets us move faster as we grow.
• Customer discovery. You'll sit directly alongside our early customers and the many ahead to understand their pain points using Adapt and feed those into proposals and shipped design work.
• Strong internal and external communication. You'll help write our launch posts, design the visuals that accompany them, and communicate directly with customers about new capabilities and how they should be understood.
• Set a high bar. Lead by example. Expect mentorship, but bring a strong default to figuring things out yourself — especially the pace of an early-stage startup in a crowded AI market.
• Collaboration. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with the team and leadership in San Francisco. We bias toward shipping, together.

You’ll also work directly with leadership: your manager (me — here’s why I joined Adapt), our CTO and co-founder Sean Smith, our CMO Ashley McClelland, and the rest of the leadership team.

How you may fail

Perhaps it's also helpful to evaluate a candidate who may not be successful at Adapt and apply inversion theory. You will not be successful if you:

• Have not worked as a professional designer in any capacity for any company
• Prefer working with a formalized product function or PM handing you specs
• Only do "product design" or only do "brand" and aren't excited to do both (plus marketing pages, plus a launch video, plus a deck)
• Think design ends when the Figma file is handed off, and don't want to be in the code or the pull request
• Find yourself waiting for direction and clarity and don't enjoy making decisions independently
• Optimize for portfolio projects instead of the work itself
• Don't enjoy talking directly to customers

What is excellence in this role

The role of leadership is to cultivate a sense of excellence on the team and in individuals on the team that reflect it. A simple way to frame it is a three-part framework:

1. What is the job to be done (see above: "How you'll be successful")
2. What is excellence in that job
3. Holding accountable to excellence (that's both your job and ours!)

You establish excellence in this role by doing the following:

In the first 30 days you independently ship requested and impactful design work — a product surface, a marketing page, a launch asset — with some guidance and direction.

In the next 30 days, you're moving more towards fuller independence, proposing ideas and talking to customers to gain conviction as to why they're worth investing in (and also shipping them), and you've started laying the foundations of the design system.

By 90 days, you're driving your own bets, closing the loop directly with customers, owning the look and feel of every new surface that ships, and you're feeling independent and cooking

After 90 days and beyond, any requisite training wheels are off and you're feeling empowered to own decisions, propose improvements, and you've established a strong customer-centric and craft-centric understanding of the Adapt product and brand and where they're going.

Benefits

Competitive compensation strategy including large equity grants for early hires at an early stage in the company's journey:

• Inclusive healthcare packages (medical, dental, vision)
• Top-tier equipment: latest Apple silicon (Mac Studio / MacBook Pro), 5K display, and any peripherals you need to do your best work
• Frontier AI access for every engineer and designer: Claude Code, OpenAI, Cursor, Codex, and most importantly unlimited internal use of Adapt itself
• Daily catered lunch in our Presidio (San Francisco) office, plus snacks and coffee
• A founder-dense, in-person team in one of the most beautiful corners of San Francisco — direct access to the CEO, CTO, and founding eng/design every day

Base salary: $180-220k for the SF Bay Area. Actual offer depends on skills, experience, and location. We're open to relocation for the right candidate but prefer Bay Area applicants today. Total comp also includes equity, benefits, and potential bonus or variable pay. Your recruiter will walk you through the details.

Adapt is committed to fostering and empowering an inclusive community within our organization. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Adapt encourages everyone to apply for our available positions, even if they don't necessarily check every box on the job description.