Founding Product Designer

• GovWell is hiring a Founding Product Designer to define what that future looks like.
• This role reports directly to our CTO and Co-Founder, Ben Cohen https://www.linkedin.com/in/bencohen5/.
• We have a hybrid work culture that combines regular in-person collaboration at our New York City office (3+ days per week) with flexibility to work remotely.
• WHY GOVWELL?
• A rare design problem: Local governments run some of the most complex workflows in the economy. Your job will be to make that complexity feel simple without stripping away the power that public servants need.
• Set the design vision for GovWell. Define the principles that make our products intuitive, differentiated, and unmistakably GovWell.
• Reimagine the core product experience. Lead a significant evolution of our platform’s visual design and interaction patterns without losing sight of the complex workflows our customers depend on.
• Design AI-native experiences. Shape how AI helps government staff complete work—not as a chatbot bolted onto existing software, but as a cohesive part of the product.
• Build our design system. Create the components, patterns, and guidance that let product and engineering teams move quickly while maintaining a consistently high bar.
• Stay close to customers. Develop a deep understanding of government staff, residents, contractors, and business owners, then turn their needs into simple and thoughtful product experiences.
• Build the Design function from 0 to 1. Define how design operates at GovWell, then hire and develop a world-class team as the company grows.
• Complexity, made simple: You have a track record of designing intuitive, beautiful products for complex use cases.
• A player, not just a coach: You’re an exceptional hands-on product designer who can take an ambiguous problem through to a polished experience—and you’re excited to do the work yourself.
• More than a pair of hands: You have strong product judgment. You challenge assumptions, simplify workflows, and help determine what should be built—not just how requirements should look.
• AI-native, not AI-curious: You’re an active user of AI and have thoughtful, evolving opinions about how it should reshape software experiences.
• Systems without bureaucracy: You can establish a design system that helps teams move faster without letting the system become more important than the product.
• Clarity creates momentum: You communicate clearly and can bring founders, product managers, engineers, and customers along with your thinking.
• Vision down to the last pixel: You move comfortably between articulating a multi-year product vision and debating the right label, state, or interaction.
• A builder of teams: You want to create a Design function and eventually lead a team, but you’re energized by starting as a hands-on individual contributor.
• Empathy without prerequisites: You can deeply understand the needs of government staff and residents without prior govtech experience.
• Values are how you operate: You align closely with our Core Values https://govwell.com/careers#core-values.

None flagged.