🧩 Product Designer (UX/UI) - Founding Team

About us

Kalmus Labs is building Remora, an AI-native learning platform designed to transform books, documents, and information into interactive, adaptive experiences people genuinely want to spend time with.

We’re combining AI, education, storytelling, design, personality, and technology to create something that feels less like traditional software and more like an environment for learning, thinking, and discovery.

We’re still a small team. That means the people joining now are not stepping into a finished machine, they will help shape the product, the company, and the way people first discover and understand Remora.

About the role

We’re looking for a Product Designer who can help turn complex product ideas into interfaces that feel simple, coherent, and obvious to use.

This is not a role focused only on making screens look polished.

Remora is growing into a connected learning environment with multiple workspaces, AI interactions, documents, navigation systems, persistent user context, and many different ways of working with information. The challenge is not simply making each screen attractive. The challenge is making the whole product feel like one system.

You’ll work closely with the founder, frontend, backend, and other creative contributors to translate product architecture, requirements, and sometimes rough ideas into flows, wireframes, prototypes, polished interfaces, and reusable design patterns.

What you’ll do

• Design complete product experiences from early concepts through polished UI.
• Translate product specifications, architecture documents, and rough ideas into understandable user flows and interfaces.
• Design and evolve Remora’s major workspaces, navigation patterns, states, and interactions.
• Create wireframes, mockups, interactive prototypes, and production-ready designs in Figma.
• Think through edge cases, empty states, loading states, errors, onboarding, transitions, and the less glamorous details that make a product actually usable.
• Build and maintain a coherent design system and reusable component language.
• Ensure new workspaces feel like parts of the same product rather than separate applications stitched together.
• Work closely with frontend developers to make designs practical to implement and clarify behavior during development.
• Collaborate with backend/product discussions when interface decisions depend on underlying system behavior.
• Review implemented interfaces and help close the gap between the design and the actual product.
• Explore multiple approaches instead of treating the first idea as automatically correct.
• Use AI heavily where useful for research, ideation, rapid exploration, prototyping, documentation, or workflow acceleration - while applying your own judgment to the result.
• Help establish the visual and interaction principles that future Remora features will follow.

You might be a good fit if you:

• think about systems and flows, not just individual screens;
• can simplify complicated products without removing what makes them powerful;
• care about usability just as much as visual quality;
• have strong visual taste and attention to detail;
• can explain why a design decision is better instead of relying only on intuition;
• are comfortable challenging product ideas when you believe there is a better solution;
• can receive criticism without treating the design as personally untouchable;
• take ownership instead of waiting for every screen and state to be specified for you;
• can work from incomplete information and ask the right questions;
• understand that designing an AI-native product often means creating interaction patterns that do not yet have perfect established conventions;
• care about consistency across a product;
• are willing to think through boring but critical details such as edge cases, responsive behavior, empty states, and errors;
• can balance ambitious ideas with what a small startup can realistically build;
• communicate well with developers;
• are comfortable iterating quickly when something doesn’t work.

You do not need to come from a famous design studio or have ten years of experience.

We care much more about how you think, the quality of your work, your taste, and whether you can turn ambiguity into a real product.

Bonus points if you have experience with

• complex SaaS or productivity products;
• AI-native interfaces;
• education or learning products;
• document / knowledge / research tools;
• information architecture;
• interaction design;
• design systems;
• responsive web design;
• mobile product design;
• prototyping;
• usability testing;
• developer handoff;
• motion / micro-interactions;
• building a product from an early stage;
• working closely with engineers;
• Figma variables, components, and advanced prototyping;
• AI-assisted design workflows.

Work style

• Remote.
• Approximately 15–20 hours per week.
• Highly flexible schedule - work when it fits your life, rather than following a fixed daily timetable.
• Designed to be compatible with university, another job, freelance work, or other commitments.
• We care much more about ownership, communication, and consistent output than about when during the day you work.
• Small, highly collaborative team.
• Direct communication.
• Fast iteration.
• Significant creative freedom.
• High ownership.
• Very little bureaucracy.

We are early enough that not everything will come with a perfect process or detailed instruction manual. We are looking for someone who finds that exciting rather than frustrating.

You will often work directly with the founder on product structure and UX decisions, then closely with developers as those designs become real.

Compensation

Equity-first role - Pre-Seed stage

Target equity: ~2% 4-year vesting / 1-year cliff.

We want to be completely transparent: we do not currently have meaningful cash compensation available for this role, because this is a self-starting startup.

This is only a fit for someone who genuinely wants to help build a company from an early stage and is comfortable accepting real startup risk in exchange for meaningful ownership.

There are no guarantees in startups.

The goal, as Kalmus Labs grows, generates revenue, or raises funding, is to transition strong contributors into paid long-term positions as soon as possible.

We are not looking for someone who feels pressured to work for free. We are looking for someone for whom this particular risk/reward tradeoff genuinely makes sense alongside other work/school/personal commitments.

How to apply

📩 Send us:

• your portfolio;
• LinkedIn or other relevant profile;
• 1–3 products, interfaces, or projects that best represent how you think;
• anything you’ve designed, prototyped, built, or helped ship;
• and a few honest sentences about what makes a digital product feel exceptionally well-designed to you - and what kind of product you would be excited to help build from the ground up.

Send to: [email protected]

Please avoid AI-generated essays or generic corporate applications. One truthful sentence is worth more than a couple of AI-written abstracts.

Using AI is completely fine - we use it ourselves. But we want to see your judgment, taste, reasoning, and personality, not polished filler.

🌐 kalmuslabs.com (soon to be updated)