Founding Product Designer

Founding Product Designer

Beehive · New York, NY (FiDi) · Full-Time

📍 FiDi, NYC · 3 days/week in office | 💰 $110K - $140k + 0.3% - 0.6% equity | 🗓 3+ years experience

About Us

Beehive is an early-stage startup building AI-powered enterprise climate risk management (ECRM) software to help companies measure and manage their climate risks. We're young, ambitious, and moving fast. Joining now means you'll help shape not only the product but also the culture and trajectory of the company.

Why This Role

This is not a cushy big-tech design role. We're being upfront: startup life can be messy. Priorities shift quickly, deadlines can be intense, and you're expected to do a lot, across many areas of the company. But if you thrive in environments where you have real ownership, direct impact, and the chance to build something that matters from the ground up, this could be the best job you've ever had.

As our founding designer, you won't just execute on specs handed down from a product team. You'll help invent the product itself. You sit alongside our engineers and founders, shape how customers experience climate risk, and define what Beehive looks and feels like from the first dashboard a CFO opens to how the AI chat communicates to the social post that brings a lead to us in the first place.

And critically:
there is no product manager between you and the product.
That's a feature, not a bug. You'll need the product instincts to match the design craft.

What You'll Do

Shape what gets built.
You’re in the room before the roadmap is written. You talk to customers, spot gaps, and propose new product directions. You’ll be helping us figure out
*what*
to build, not just how to make it look good.

Think in systems, not screens.
Our platform has interconnected modules — risk mapping, impact quantification, disclosure generation. You’ll need to hold the whole product in your head and design experiences where every piece fits together coherently.

Take ideas all the way through.
The journey here is: raw idea → vibe-coded prototype → engineering-ready Figma spec. You’ll move fluidly between those modes. Some of what you prototype will have front-end components only; some will require thinking through back-end behavior and data flows. You don’t need to be an engineer, but you need to think like one when it matters.

Own the full product design surface.
UX flows, data visualizations, onboarding experiences, and the marketing materials that tell our story. From the first sketch to pixel-perfect Figma handoff, you own it.

Deliver pixel-perfect handoffs.
Our engineers are fast and good. You make them faster. That means complete component specs, interaction states, edge cases documented, and a component library they can pull from without asking you a dozen questions.

Drive marketing design.
Own the visual language across LinkedIn, the website, pitch decks, customer reports, and event materials.

Set the design foundation.
Establish our design system, component library, and brand standards, building the scaffold that future designers will work within.

What Success Looks Like

Within your first month, you've:

• Shipped at least one meaningful improvement to our core product
• Materially upgraded our design system and component library.
• Delivered a refreshed marketing presence (website and/or social templates) that reflects where Beehive is headed.
• Presented 1–2 prototype concepts for new product directions.
• Identified at least one product gap or opportunity — through customer conversations or your own product analysis — and brought a concrete proposal to the team that’s now being actively considered.
• Made everyone around you faster, by turning ideas and feedback into tangible artifacts the team can react to.

What We're Looking For

Startup-only design experience.
You have been one of three or fewer designers at a technology startup. You know what it means to own the design function — no handoff culture, no design reviews with 12 stakeholders, no waiting for a brand team to approve a button color.

Product depth.
You've worked closely enough with engineering and customers that you have genuine product intuition. You can spot a UX flow that will confuse users before it's built. You think about data models when you're designing tables. You ask "what happens when the API returns nothing?" before the engineer has to.

AI-first.
You use AI tools daily — for prototyping, generating design variants, writing microcopy, automating repetitive work. In your interview, you will show us specific examples.

You prototype before you polish.
A rough working demo beats a beautiful static mock. You've spun up vibe-coded prototypes — using Bolt, Lovable, Claude Code, or equivalent — and you know when that's the right tool versus when Figma is.

Pixel-perfect Figma execution.
When it's time to hand off to engineering, your files are clean, complete, and unambiguous. You've thought through every state, every edge case, every responsive breakpoint that matters.

In-office 3 days/week
at our FiDi office in Manhattan. Some of us are there 5 days a week, but that's up to you. These aren't crazy hours. Many of us have kids and leave at 5pm. We just think we do better work when we are in the same room.

No prior climate experience required.
Curiosity and willingness to go deep on the domain is what matters.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $110K - $140k (based on experience)
• Equity: 0.3–0.6%, standard 4-year vesting with a 1-year cliff
• Direct collaboration with founders and early customers
• Opportunity to grow into a design leadership role as the team expands
• When it's someone's birthday, we get bagels (as mentioned, this is a startup — no frills!)

Why Join Beehive

• Be the design voice at a company at an inflection point. We've got over 50 enterprise customers in our first year, and plan on 3x'ng this year. Be a part of that growth.
• Work on a mission that matters. Enterprise Climate Risk Management is about protecting people and assets. We're building the infrastructure that helps companies navigate it.
• Your work will be seen by CFOs, Chief Risk Officers, and sustainability leads at enterprise companies. The design bar needs to be high.
• You'll help shape not just the product, but the culture, the brand, and the story of what Beehive is.