Product Design Lead, Founding Team

Product Design Lead, Founding Team

Wondr · San Francisco, CA · Full-time

Contract-to-hire

About Wondr

Wondr is an AI-native, human-centered social and community platform built around identity, intent, and belonging, not engagement hacks and algorithmic noise. By unifying verified identity, intelligent discovery, and creator-first tooling, Wondr helps people find meaningful communities, and gives creators the tools to organize, activate, and reward their audiences with real ownership and aligned incentives. Wondr Intelligence, our proprietary AI layer, is trained on human contribution, not engagement signals. It surfaces the right people and content, explains why, and makes participation visible and rewarded, while building the taste and trust graphs that will become the foundation for the agentic web.

We're a founding team that's built and scaled culture-driven consumer products at Tesla, Lucasfilm/Disney, Nintendo, Eventbrite, and GoFundMe, developed and scaled community infrastructure at Cisco, and shipped AI and distributed systems for Microsoft, Ethereum, and Solana. We've built campaigns and communities for brands like Coca-Cola, Nike, Mercedes Benz, American Express, Met Gala, and Louis Vuitton.

The Role

You'll set the craft bar for everything Wondr ships. You'll own the design system, the core product surfaces, and the interaction language that makes Wondr feel considered rather than templated, distinctly Wondr rather than a copy of Discord, Patreon, or Instagram. You'll work closely with the Founder/CEO, CTO, engineering, and a visual designer, turning product direction into screens the team can confidently build.

This is an ownership role, not a support role. You won't inherit a design system to maintain; you'll build it from scratch and decide what the product looks and feels like at every surface. The Founder is looking for a real partner on product feel, not someone to execute a spec she's already fully defined. If you want a seat where your calls actually shape how Wondr looks and behaves, this is that seat.

This starts as a contract engagement built to prove fit fast, with a clear track to a senior role on the founding team.

What You'll Own

• Design system: Build and own the system from scratch: tokens, components, patterns, documentation. Every new screen should look like it belongs to the same product.
• Product surfaces: Design and ship every creator- and member-facing surface, from onboarding through the core product experience.
• Product feel: Define what makes Wondr distinctly Wondr. Partner with the Founder on product direction and hold the craft bar as the product grows.
• Research and judgment: Study interaction patterns, competitive products, and user behavior. Flag design and experience gaps before they become expensive to fix in engineering.
• Delivery: Hand off specs engineering can build against without guesswork, and follow through from concept to shipped screen, not just to handoff.
• Source of truth: Maintain the design system and pattern library as the one place the team looks for how something should look and behave.

What We're Looking For

• 4+ years in product design, with real ownership in a small team where your decisions had compounding consequences
• A shipped consumer product you owned end to end, not an agency handoff
• A design system you built from scratch, not one you inherited or designed on top of
• Strong point of view on what makes a product feel right, not just look right
• Enough motion and interaction craft to make a product feel alive, not static
• Comfort respectfully challenging founders and collaborators when something can be better
• High personal ownership: you spot what's missing and fix it without being asked

Especially strong candidates may have:
Background in consumer social, creator tools, community platforms, or culture-adjacent products; zero-to-one product experience; genuine interest in music, culture, media, or wellness communities; something you've built yourself.

Based in the SF Bay Area, LA, or California

What you'll get
Competitive compensation and real equity at the ground floor of a company that could define how trust works on the internet. A senior team that ships and cares about what they build. Direct access to the founding team from day one.

To apply:

Send to [email protected]:

• Your resume
• Your portfolio
• Your submission to the following prompt: "Wondr must help a member discover a relevant community or person without using infinite feeds, popularity metrics, or opaque recommendations." In 20–30 minutes, sketch a discovery experience and articulate:
• the recommendation explanation (“why am I seeing this?”),
• the signal that demonstrates human trust or relevance,
• what you intentionally excluded and why.

No recruiters.

Wondr is an equal opportunity employer.