Founding Product Designer

About this role

ABOUT KERNEL Agents are starting to sell, buy and operate on behalf of companies. But before an agent can close a deal, qualify an account, route a lead or assess risk, it has to answer a basic question: which company is this? Today, that answer is messy, and no one answers it reliably. Business identity lives across CRMs, ERPs and third-party datasets full of duplicates, missing parent companies, stale addresses and incorrect enrichment.

The cost shows up across the enterprise: sales teams miss revenue opportunities because they lack the right account context; operations teams take on avoidable exposure because risk signals are fragmented or wrong; and finance teams end up chasing, writing off, or defaulting on bad debt that should have been caught earlier. Humans have worked around that mess for years. Agents cannot. They need a reliable business identity layer they can trust.

Kernel is building that layer: the business registry for agents. We issue a permanent KERN ID for every business, plus the context an agent needs to act on it. Ops, data and revenue teams at Gong, Legora, Mistral, Canva and Checkout already use Kernel on their own systems. Agents are next, and there will be far more of them. We have raised $14M from top VCs and operators at Plaid, OpenAI, Slack and others, and we are growing 5x YoY.

THE ROLE You’ll be Kernel’s Founding Product Designer, shaping how people experience Kernel and building a product they’ll love to use. Your mission: simplify complexity. Make a powerful product feel effortless: clearer workflows, sharper mental models, fewer decisions, more confidence. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Own core UX end-to-end: flows, IA, interaction design, and visual craft. - Run ground-truth discovery: lead user interviews, synthesize fast, turn insight into shipped changes.

- Prototype quickly: use whatever gets to a high-signal prototype (Figma, v0, Figma Make, code, etc.). - Ship with engineering + PM: tight loops, high quality in production, iterate fast. - Build the design foundation: principles, patterns, lightweight system - without slowing the team down. - 5% “other stuff”: occasional help with decks/narrative when it moves the business. WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR (IMPACT > SENIORITY) - Founding designer experience is a plus, but not a requirement - what matters most is that you have early-stage startup experience and can point to tangible examples of transforming a business through design.