Founding Product Designer

Overview

[REDACTED]'s mission is to grow vLLM as the world's AI inference engine and accelerate AI progress by making inference cheaper and faster. Founded by the creators and core maintainers of vLLM, we sit at the intersection of models and hardware, a position that took years to build.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Founding Product Designer to give [REDACTED] and vLLM a distinct visual identity, sharp brand presence, and highly intuitive developer product experiences. This is a 0-to-1, full-stack design role for a creator with high aesthetic taste, deep technical curiosity, and an AI-native way of executing.

You will bridge the gap between technical infrastructure and visual craft. In your first 90 days, you’ll establish our visual language across high-visibility social assets, model launch campaigns, blog graphics, and partner announcements. As we scale, you’ll transition into shaping our web surfaces, brand identity, internal tooling, and core product interfaces. You’ll work directly with founders, engineering leads, product, and marketing to build design systems that scale across open-source communities, developer tools, and enterprise platforms.

30-60-90 Day Milestones

30 Days: Own and ship high-impact design assets for model launches, technical content, and ecosystem news. You’ll onboard to the inference ecosystem by establishing a baseline visual language for [REDACTED] and vLLM.

60 Days: Expand into initial UI/UX designs for our production tooling and developer dashboards, while continuing to increase your design footprint across our core website, interactive developer pages, partner announcement assets, and i.

90 Days: Own the core design for our enterprise product: focus on core product design—refining UI/UX for developer tools, optimizing developer workflows, and establishing a unified design system from brand assets to product components.

Skills and Qualifications

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience in Product Design, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Computer Science, Interactive Media, or a related field.
• A strong portfolio or tech-forward personal website demonstrating exceptional craft, strong typography, layout, visual systems, and interactive UI/UX thinking.
• AI-native operating style, using modern AI image, design, and code generators to explore concepts rapidly and ship production-ready assets.
• High technical taste and fluency, with a track record of designing for developers, technical products, or complex systems.
• End-to-end execution capability—able to take a rough idea or technical blog post and independently produce polished visuals, landing pages, or product mockups without needing prescribed steps.
• Ability to collaborate credibly with technical founders, engineers, and product managers in a fast-paced, high-urgency startup environment.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience designing for developer tools, AI infrastructure, cloud platforms, open-source communities, or technical SaaS products.
• Strong background in visual design, brand systems, illustration, or graphic assets alongside digital product design (UI/UX).
• Proficiency with modern web design and front-end prototyping tools (Figma, Framer, Webflow, React/Tailwind code prototypes).
• Experience designing graphics and collateral for major developer conferences, community events, and launch campaigns.

Bonus points if you have:

• Motion design skills (After Effects, Rive, Lottie) or lightweight 3D design experience (Blender, Cinema 4D, Spline).
• Built and maintained a personal tech-forward website or creative engineering projects showcasing custom interaction design.
• Created 0-to-1 visual identities or design systems for a high-growth startup or prominent open-source project.

Logistics

Location: This role is based in San Francisco, California. Will consider remote in the US for exceptional candidates.

Compensation: Compensation is to be determined based on background, skills, and experience. Offers include equity.

Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas on a case-by-case basis.

Benefits: [REDACTED] offers generous health, dental, and vision benefits as well as 401(k) company match.