Founding Product Designer

💡 About Brightwave

Brightwave is a deep technology startup building LLM-powered investment research systems that can autonomously reason across huge bodies of multimodal text, table and image data such as SEC filings, real-time news feeds, earnings call transcripts, legal rulings, patents, sell-side analysis and more. Brightwave helps active asset managers accelerate research workflows and generate investment ideas with unprecedented depth and comprehensiveness. Brightwave is experiencing rapid growth and commercial success, with paying customers with assets under management in excess of $120B and brisk demand from diverse clients across financial services.

🛰️ Create Something Incredible

We hire exceptional humans who are intrinsically motivated to do great work. As a principle we tend to favor a smaller team of senior, seasoned professionals who intuitively know what needs to happen next. Brightwave's team includes engineers from places like Databricks and Meta, NeurIPS-published research scientists, and commercial talents with tours of duty at firms like Goldman Sachs, UBS and McKinsey.

Our venture investors include some of the world's largest asset managers as well as angels from OpenAI, Databricks, Uber, LinkedIn and the Solana Foundation.

🪡 Product Design at Brightwave

Product Design is a critical-path function charged with an exceptionally difficult challenge: how to reveal the thought process of an intelligent system that has considered tens of thousands of pages of content to a user in a way that is intuitive and useful. The Brightwave product is data-intensive and targets sophisticated professionals — think Photoshop rather than Airbnb — and will require the creation of entirely new user experiences and workflow patterns to enable users to make the most of fundamentally new AI capabilities. The work spans the entire product lifecycle, to include user research, design partner groups, experience and visual design, rapid prototyping, information visualization and more.

Success in this role will benefit from a mature design philosophy, mastery of the technical tools of the trade, excellent taste in visual media, a clear and compelling communication style, intellectual curiosity, and a good sense of humor.

🎯 Responsibilities

• Lead the team with a clear vision for the future of AI products; establish foundational design and product practices that define the Brightwave user experience

• Create UI designs and interactive prototypes for a beautiful, information-rich interface including AI-generated content, knowledge cards, visualizations & multimodal search results

• Develop & lead a user research program leveraging investment professionals ranging from junior analysts at secretive hedge funds to executives at firms with trillions in assets

• Facilitate rapid prototyping for novel product looks and algorithm assessment systems

• Create a well-organized, modular design system that powers our production front end

• Produce distinctive visual media for public collateral such as slide decks, landing pages, email campaigns, etc.

🚀 Capabilities

Strong candidates for this role will have some (but not necessarily all) of the following capabilities and experiences. At Brightwave we grow together.

• 7+ years of design experience, including exposure to startup environments

• A mastery of the technical aspects of the craft, including deep familiarity with tools like Figma, Photoshop & Illustrator

• An empathetic and methodical user research style that avoids leading the witness and creates insightful documentation that’s readily consumed by others

• Experience designing for data-intensive applications and ML/AI products, including considerations relating to progressive loading, impression and action tracking, personalization etc.

• A working understanding of the considerations facing the engineers who consume your work product

✨ Values Matter

We stay true to our values, and work with people who do the same.

• Ownership. We take responsibility for how we choose to respond to our circumstances.

• Humility. Most situations warrant a sense of curiosity and a willingness to be wrong.

• Craftsmanship. We take pride in the work and tend to the details.

• Focus. Transformative work only happens in the presence of intense, sustained focus.

• Empathy. Seek first to understand - most people are basically reasonable and want to do the right thing.

• Humor. Life is a gift, let’s enjoy it together.