Careers · Design
Design Taste Lead
Own the scoring function that decides whether what we ship looks like anyone made it.
- Team
- Design Labs
- Type
- Full-time
- Location
- Remote-first (US timezone overlap)
- Status
- Real role, hiring after the first two
Why this role exists
We build a lot of sites fast, with a lot of machine assistance, and the default failure mode of that is work that is competent and completely generic. We treat taste as a scoring function — brand fit, hierarchy, restraint, consistency, interaction quality, minus the tells of AI-generated design — and someone has to own it and be right.
What you'll do
- Own the taste critic and the brand DNA locks that gate what ships across the fleet
- Review work against the critic, and improve the critic when it disagrees with you and you're right
- Curate the reference library that trains our judgment — typed, sourced, and legally clean
- Set the visual direction for new brands before a wireframe exists
- Say no to work that passes every automated gate and is still bad
What we need from you
- A portfolio where the restraint is visible and the range is real
- You can articulate why something is wrong specifically enough that it becomes a rule
- Comfortable working inside a design system and extending it rather than starting over per project
- Opinionated about typography and hierarchy in a way you can defend
Nice to have
- Front-end skills — enough to change it rather than annotate it
- Brand identity work
- Motion and interaction design
Your first 90 days
- Week 1–2: audit the live fleet and rank every surface by how generic it reads
- Week 3–8: fix the worst offenders and turn each fix into a rule the critic enforces
- By day 90: owning direction on new brands, with the critic measurably catching what you'd catch
Compensation
Base
$130,000 – $170,000
Equity
0.3% – 0.7%
Base is US-remote, at lead level. You own a scoring function the whole fleet ships against, not a queue of screens.
Apply
Interested in the Design Taste Lead role?
Tell us what you've built and what you'd want to own here. No cover letter, no portal — a real message reaches a real person.