Founding Designer Track

The problem

A 12 year old in Amman says a French sentence out loud. In the four seconds that follow, our engine reads five things: how accurate the phonemes were, how fast she answered, how long she hesitated before she started, how many times she retried, and how long she's been working. Then it decides whether to make the next thing harder or easier.

That decision is the entire company. It is based on real psycholinguistics, it works, and right now the student sees almost none of it. She just gets a different question and no idea why.

Designing that moment is the job. Making an invisible adaptive system legible to a child, in a way that builds trust instead of anxiety, without turning the screen into a dashboard. Nobody in this category has solved it. Duolingo doesn't try. Immerse doesn't try.

The second problem

We have five surfaces: web, iOS, Android, AR and VR. They do not look like the same company. Different type, different color, different spacing, different everything. There is no system, because there has never been a designer who owned one.

You'd build it. One system, five surfaces, seven languages.

What's real here

3,973 students. 102 school deployments. We need to polish the design before we can charge our 2,500 school waitlist. We have a government pilot in Jordan. Seven years of work and have started our seed round which closes December 13th of this year. This is not a deck.

What you'd own

All of it. There is no design lead, no brand guidelines, no committee. You decide what Gabb looks like and then it looks like that.

What I need from you

That you can ship, not just concept. Figma files that engineers can build from. Opinions you'll defend and then change when you're wrong.

What you get

Founding designer title and real founding equity, four year vest, one year cliff. Direct work with me every day. Your work in front of thousands of kids learning a language, which is a thing almost no designer gets to say.

What you don't get

Money, for now. A team. Anyone to tell you what to make.

If this is you

Send three things you've shipped and tell me which one you'd tear up and start over. That answer is the only thing I'm actually reading for. Upon completion you are eligible for full time starting at 90K. You will recieve 5% equity as well if you are able to complete the task, and you will get hands on user research from our pilots.

Malcolm Lee, Founder and CEO
[email protected]