Product Design - 1st hire, build with AI

Join an early-stage startup.
Accelerate economic opportunity.

Join us as our 1st Product Designer!

You'll leverage AI as a supercharger for your craft, not a replacement for it. AI lets you do things that weren't even tenable five years ago: run deep research before you start, rapidly explore dozens of ideas, stress-test designs through multiple user perspectives, and arrive at a much stronger starting point for the high-fidelity work that still demands a skilled designer's eye.

You'll experiment with AI to streamline your workflows as it becomes increasingly more useful.

About us

• Kovo is expanding access to financial tools for people historically excluded from the traditional credit system. We believe everyone deserves the opportunity for economic independence, and we’re building products that help people establish financial identity and unlock opportunity.

  Over the past three years, Kovo has grown revenue 20x while maintaining exceptional capital efficiency. We rank above the 99th percentile in revenue-per-employee benchmarks, reflecting the leverage of a small, high-performing team.

  The team combines the ambition of a venture-scale company with the discipline of a profitable business. We reached positive free cash flow early in our lifecycle, allowing us to grow with less dilution and focus on building for the long term.

  Kovo is backed by Inspired Capital and Homebrew, along with founders and leaders from Plaid, Column, Ramp, Affirm, Cash App, NerdWallet, Alloy, MoonPay, Uber, Etsy, LendingClub, and more. We’re looking for exceptional people to help us scale the company another 20x and beyond.

  Why you might be excited about us

  • Direct impact on millions of people’s ability to access credit

    High ownership with minimal bureaucracy

    Speed, learning, and impact are core values

    Why you might not be excited about us

    • Roles and priorities evolve quickly

      Some systems and processes are still being built

      The pace of execution and career growth is intense (not optimized for work-life balance)

      What you'll do

      Design end-to-end experiences

      Own the full design process: from research and discovery through wireframes, prototypes, and polished UI

      Design intuitive, accessible, and visually compelling experiences that translate complex financial problems into clear user flows

      Evolve our design system to ensure consistency and scalability across the product

      Use data, user research, and experimentation to continuously validate and improve designs

      Use AI to amplify your craft

      Apply AI to supercharge upfront research, competitive analysis, and rapid low-fidelity exploration of dozens of concepts

      Validate ideas faster through simulated user perspectives (e.g., walking through the product as different personas)

      Apply your taste and judgment to identify the strongest directions from broad AI-assisted explorations, then invest your craft skills in fewer, higher-quality high-fidelity iterations

      Collaborate across teams

      Work closely with product, marketing, engineering, and customer experience to inform and iterate on designs

      Partner with engineering to ensure seamless design-to-development handoffs

      About you

      Mindset

      Energized by creating user experiences that empower underserved individuals seeking financial independence

      Self-starter who thrives in ambiguity, handles shifting priorities fluidly, and takes full ownership of outcomes

      Comfortable in a high-intensity, remote environment with significant accountability

      Motivated to experiment with and use AI as an enabler for higher-quality craft not as a shortcut to lower-quality output

      Skills

      4+ years or equivalent depth of experience designing digital products, ideally in fintech or consumer-facing applications

      Advanced proficiency in Storybook, Figma, and Framer

      Strong ability to translate complex problems into clear, intuitive user flows and explain and defend design decisions

      Experience with design systems, component-based UI, and design-to-development handoff

      Familiarity with experimentation, A/B testing concepts, and using data to inform design decisions

      Basic understanding of Git and version control workflows

      Basic familiarity with HTML, CSS and accessibility best practices

      Bonus: Experience using AI tools to create interactive prototypes for testing ideas