Founding Product Designer

About Sapiom

Sapiom is building payments infrastructure for a machine-driven economy, where AI agents can safely carry out real-world transactions on behalf of people and businesses. Its platform is designed to let autonomous systems spend, follow policies, monetize usage, and move across payment rails without companies having to create their own payments, risk, and compliance stack from scratch.

The company focuses on enabling secure, controlled financial access for agents by tracking every dollar spent, every policy decision, and every risk signal generated. It is supported by a team with deep experience in payments and infrastructure, and has raised $15.75M from Accel, Menlo, and Anthropic.

About the Role

This position sits at the intersection of design, product, and engineering. The challenge is to turn complex, high-stakes financial workflows into interfaces that feel clear, trustworthy, and natural to use. The ideal candidate thinks in systems, understands both product logic and visual craft, and is comfortable challenging assumptions while shaping the user experience.

What You Will Do

You will own the design journey across Sapiom’s core product, starting with discovery and requirement gathering alongside Product and continuing through iterative visual work and implementation support with Engineering. The role covers the toughest UX problems in agentic commerce, including spend permissions, policy setup, live risk visibility, developer-facing APIs, and dashboards that help humans monitor autonomous financial activity.

You will also help define and evolve Sapiom’s design language as the product matures, deciding when to apply existing patterns, when to improve them, and when to intentionally introduce something new. The broader goal is to create software that builds developer confidence immediately and strengthens that trust over time.

Responsibilities

• Lead the full design workflow across product experiences, using the right level of fidelity at each stage, from FigJam brainstorming to Figma mockups and production-ready prototypes built with tools such as v0, Cursor, or Claude Code.
• Work closely with Product and Engineering to influence direction early, not only to execute finalized specifications.
• Shape, refine, and extend the design system with care, balancing consistency with the need for new interaction patterns when the use case calls for it.
• Create interfaces for difficult product areas such as agent spend approval, policy enforcement, real-time transaction oversight, and developer configuration flows.
• Champion strong design standards across the organization so the product remains coherent, polished, and high quality.
• Help build the team’s design culture by giving constructive feedback, mentoring when useful, and contributing to an environment that supports strong design work.

Requirements

• Experience designing interactive products in demanding technical environments such as developer tools, infrastructure software, fintech, or security.
• Strong visual design, UI, and interaction skills, with sound judgment on when to stay within an established system and when to advance it.
• Hands-on familiarity with the modern design and prototyping stack, including FigJam, Figma, and code-based prototype tools such as v0, Cursor, or comparable tools.
• Excellent written and spoken communication skills, with the ability to explain design decisions clearly, ask for feedback, and influence teammates without formal authority.
• Proven ability to work effectively in fast-paced engineering settings where priorities shift quickly and products ship continuously.
• Confidence in defending a point of view under pressure while staying open to stronger ideas and better outcomes.
• Comfort working in uncertainty and helping define a role that is still taking shape, with substantial ownership from the start.

Additional Information

This is an early-stage founding role with significant responsibility and influence over both the product and the design function.

Location: San Francisco, CA. Employment is full-time and onsite.

No stipend or salary amount was specified in the source.