About the role
You'd be the only designer, reporting to the founder and owning everything between "the feature exists" and "users can actually use it." That work splits in two:
- Proactive UX ownership (~70%). You hunt down friction nobody filed a ticket about - through analytics, user feedback, and your own daily use of the product - and fix it end to end.
- Polish after engineering (~30%). Engineers ship the raw v1; you rework the flow, copy, states and discoverability until a new user gets it without a tutorial.
You design and you build. Self-contained UI ships from your hands; deeper engineering work goes to engineers as a working prototype. UX flaws - confusing flows, missing empty states, unclear errors - are yours, even on code you didn't write. Performance, architecture, and bundle size are not.
Your focus in the first three months:
- Redesign onboarding from scratch based on what the data shows about first-session drop-off.
- Design and ship a flow that lets non-technical users review and validate the tests our AI agent generates.
- Build a user-friendly error system with clear resolution paths.
Why this role
- What you do reaches real users in days, not months.
- You're the only designer in a 5-person team, so your design decisions go straight to users.
- Funded by JetBrains, not VCs - we work for user value, not for metrics that look good in the next funding round.
Required experience
You'll fit if you've spent the last few years closer to the build than to the brief - shipping the changes you noticed, prototyping options instead of arguing them, keeping the loop with users tight. Concretely:
- You've shipped a real product or significant feature, owning both design and implementation using AI coding tools like Cursor or Claude Code. Side projects, internal tools, and solo work all count.
- You've worked at least one year in a startup or fast-moving team.
- You've owned UX across multiple user journeys in a web or desktop app - ideally as #1 or #2 designer in a startup.
- You've driven multiple product changes from analytics, support tickets, or interviews you ran yourself - not from a PM brief or internal opinion.
Nice to have
- You've designed developer tools, QA or testing products, or other technical B2B SaaS.
- You've worked on AI-powered products or LLM-based features.
- You've spent serious time on product management or frontend development - in a job, on a side project, or through deliberate self-study.
- You've run your own user interviews and lightweight research.