Founding Designer — Commod
🏆 Top 3 — Startup Battle, AI Engineer World's Fair 2026, San Francisco. Judged by Garry Tan (Y Combinator).
Remote (global) · Team in Dallas and distributed · Full-time · Meaningful equity + salary
We're building the trust and credentialing layer for one of the largest analog markets on earth — physical commodities (energy, metals, agriculture, roughly $20T in annual trade). Today the market runs on relationship-gated negotiations, opaque deal flows, and brokers acting as expensive intermediaries. We're replacing the handshake economy with engineered trust: credentialed participants, authenticated documents, auditable actions, and long-running AI agents that take high-stakes actions inside complex deal flows.
In July 2026 we placed top 3 in the Startup Battle at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco — judged by Garry Tan of Y Combinator — for our vision to agentify global physical commodity trade.
• The platform is live and runs real multi-party commodity deals end-to-end — listing, negotiation, contracting, conditions, inspection, shipping, settlement
• Customers lined up to use it, plus active enterprise and government partner conversations
• Actively raising our seed round
• Ten people, an internal engineering team we just built, and no designer
You are the first designer, and you own design outright — no one above you, no committee.
The product is genuinely hard: two counterparties negotiating a contract, conditions that must be satisfied in sequence, inspectors, documents, disputes, settlement. It works. It is not yet obvious. Your job is to make a $5M commodity deal feel as legible as sending an email.
• Own the whole surface — marketplace, deal flow, negotiation, contracts, compliance, admin
• Set the design system — we're on shadcn/ui + Tailwind and it needs an actual system on top of it
• Weekly design review with the founders — direct access, real decision authority
• Work in the codebase if you want to — our engineers ship with AI tooling daily, and a designer who can open a PR is force-multiplied here
You'd be designing against React + TypeScript + Tailwind + shadcn/ui on the front end, NestJS + Postgres + Temporal behind it. You do not need to know that stack. You need to be curious about what it means for an interface when a deal can be in eleven states and four people disagree about which one it's in.
• 5+ years designing complex software — B2B, fintech, logistics, marketplaces, or anything with state machines and multiple roles
• You have shipped, not just presented. You can point at a live product and say which parts are yours
• Comfortable with ambiguity and dense domains. You'll need to learn how commodity trade actually works, and you'll find that interesting rather than tedious
• AI tooling is in your workflow, not a thing you tried once — Figma Make, v0, Lovable, Cursor, whatever gets you to a real artifact fastest
• Strong written English. We're distributed across time zones; most decisions happen in writing
1. This form → 2. Two conversations: a portfolio walkthrough where you drive, then a call with the founder → 3. A two-week trial → 4. Offer
We respond to every application within 48 hours.
Takes about 15 minutes. Please answer properly rather than quickly — we read every one.
Where are you based? (city, country)
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Link to one product flow you shipped — multi-step, multi-state, real users. Not a Dribbble shot.
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What was broken before you touched it, what changed, and how did you know it worked?
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One screen in your portfolio you're least happy with, and why
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Which AI tools are actually in your workflow, and what do you use each for?
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Do you write code? If so, what have you shipped? (Fine to say no)
Earliest start date, and hours/week you can commit
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