Product Designer

THE ROLE

As a Product Designer at Valkai, you are accountable for outcomes, not just designs. You'll work across product, engineering, and pharma stakeholders to define the right problems and ship solutions that change how life sciences professionals interact with AI. You'll distill complex, high-stakes workflows into interfaces where the craft is what makes powerful AI feel approachable. You'll establish the design language and reusable patterns that let Valkai scale from individual agents to an automation platform.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• Thoughtful problem solvers: You approach problems holistically, starting with a clear and accurate understanding of the user and the workflow. You break down complex, high-stakes processes into clean, intuitive interfaces. You articulate design rationale in terms of user outcomes and business impact, not just aesthetics.

• Not ideological about design: To you, design is about tradeoffs. You may have strong opinions on what works, but you're not dogmatic. You can adapt quickly and are receptive to new approaches, especially as the underlying technology evolves.

• Organized and self-sufficient: You are comfortable running your own design process end-to-end, navigating ambiguity, and finding ways to create impact. You establish lightweight, scalable design patterns without needing a mature system in place.

• Owner of your mission: You are an owner of the product experience. You take pride in the craft — the polish, the consistency, the details that build user trust — and you're accountable for whether users actually adopt what you ship.

• Grit: You will run through walls to drive product outcomes.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Own product design end to end: Partner with PM and engineering to frame problems, explore solutions, and ship improvements. Stay involved through build and iteration, not just handoff.

• Simplify complex life sciences workflows: Distill multi-step, high-stakes processes into interfaces that feel intuitive without sacrificing the rigor pharma and biotech users need. Make AI feel accessible, not intimidating.

• Start with an LLM and end in Figma: Use AI to move fast through early exploration, then bring validated concepts into Figma for full state coverage and production readiness.

• Set and hold the bar for craft: Sweat the details that shape how the product feels: typography, spacing, transitions, empty states, hover behaviors. Great defaults compound. Sloppy ones erode trust.

• Design for the 80/20: Make the product work consistently across customers and use cases. Encode judgment and complexity under the hood while keeping the default experience simple and successful for most users.

• Build the scaffolding for scale: Establish reusable components, interaction patterns, and design abstractions that let the team rapidly ship new agents without custom-designing every workflow.

NICE TO HAVE'S

• 2–6 years of experience in product design at an enterprise AI startup.

• Experience shipping products where craft and polish matter.

• Comfort across product, brand, and visual design.

• Experience designing for probabilistic or non-deterministic systems (AI, ML).

• Experience at a fast-growing startup.

• NYC-based.

BENEFITS

• Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity.

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents.

• Generous PTO policy.

• Paid parental leave.

At Valkai, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status.