Founding Product Designer

Beacon Holdings is hiring a Founding Product Designer to act as a Design Lead embedded with portfolio companies in San Francisco. In this founding role, you will turn difficult business problems into products people rely on by partnering closely with customers, operators, designers, and engineers from discovery through adoption.

The work centers on proving measurable value, helping portfolio teams reuse what works, and ensuring successful handoffs so teams can operate independently. You will lead scoped engagements end-to-end while using Arc and Cortex where they support deployment and learning.

How you will contribute

• Embed with portfolio companies, collaborating with customers and operators, and partnering with designers and engineers from discovery through adoption.
• Own a mission, not just a backlog, by leading a scoped engagement through adoption, measured value, and an accepted handoff.
• Identify the right problem with portfolio teams by understanding customer needs and product priorities; observe real work, cases, exceptions, decisions, handoffs, and constraints; prioritize by value, feasibility, effort, risk, and reuse.
• Shape the product and the proof by aligning on a bounded pilot, users, baseline, success criteria, and stop conditions with the product or business owner.
• Simplify the process before deciding where people, software, or agents belong, then simplify again as you validate what works.
• Lead delivery with partners by setting requirements and priorities, working with portfolio product and engineering teams (and designers as needed) to test the smallest complete solution, resolve dependencies, and adjust scope as learning arrives.
• Stay through adoption by testing with customers and operators; protect reliability and continuity by defining failure and recovery paths, organizing rollout and training, and improving through live feedback.
• Treat launch as a milestone rather than the outcome.
• Prove value by measuring accepted results, recurring use, quality, time, and total cost, including review, rework, and support; distinguish realized savings from estimated capacity released; recommend whether to improve, expand, or stop.
• Leave the company stronger by handing off to named business and technical owners with acceptance; capture reusable workflows, evaluation cases, and lessons learned.
• Use Arc (an emerging agents, workflows, and applications platform) where it helps the deployment, and bring field evidence to Cortex, which unites business context, data, and insights.

What you bring

• Evidence of taking ambiguous product or operational problems through delivery to sustained use and measurable improvement.
• Product judgment to challenge requests, uncover constraints, and prioritize effectively.
• Technical fluency in AI-enabled products, integrations, data, and evaluations, including ability to inspect behavior and traces, prototype ideas, and discuss reliability, cost, and tradeoffs with engineers.
• The ability to earn trust with operators and leaders, communicate clearly, and lead cross-functional work without formal authority.
• Sound judgment about risk, permissions, human review, and when not to automate; experience with production AI workflows is valuable.

Success looks like

• Better customer-facing products and internal workflows that people keep using.
• Verified improvements against a baseline, plus receiving teams that can operate independently.
• Value reuse and early stopping of weak pilots, instead of launch counts or demo-focused outcomes.
• Ownership of the agreed engagement alongside portfolio product and engineering teams, while respecting their roadmap and ongoing ownership.
• Clear boundaries: engineers own implementation and technical reliability, designers own interaction quality and usability, and company owners approve access, rollout, and acceptance of business results.
• Turning contributions into adoption.

Technologies you will use

• Arc
• Cortex

Beacon Software values

• Humility: acknowledge being wrong along the way; hold strong beliefs weakly and seek ideas from anyone.
• Honesty: truth-seeking in business problems; trust earned over time.
• Hunger: high standards, deep responsibility, and pride in follow-through.
• Horizon: build a generational software company with compounding growth over decades.

AI in the hiring process

• Beacon Software uses Artificial Intelligence and AI-enabled tools to assist with screening, reviewing, organizing, and highlighting profiles and applications that match key requirements.
• AI does not make hiring decisions: every application is reviewed by a member of the team, and all decisions are made by humans for a fair, thoughtful, and equitable candidate experience.