Why join koodos labs?

You should join koodos labs for the people and our mission.

We aspire to build the best team of the 2020s. Just like PayPal in the 90s, Google in the 00s, and Stripe in the 10s, we want to be known as "a place where it's good to be from." If you join us, we promise to be the best place to grow your career — with the best people you've ever worked with. We’re also working on a very bold mission.

We care deeply about helping people connect more deeply with themselves and others. And in the spirit of personal empowerment, we aim to invert the internet's data model over time and put individuals in control of their digital identities.

Read more about working at koodos labs here.

What we’re building

We’re building Shelf. It's a digital shelf that updates as you consume content online. You can control what shows up on your shelf, and see when people you know are watching, reading or listening to the same thing. And it's built on top of infrastructure that allows you to reclaim control over your consumption and interest data, and provision third-party access to it to personalize experiences without compromising your privacy.

The Opportunity

The Ultimate Guide to the Founding Designer Role

We’re looking for an experienced, thoughtful product designer to join our founding team and help bring this vision to life.

In this role you will:

• Work directly with CEO (Jad)

• Jump into detailed edge cases in Figma, but also zoom out to think about how it all fits together on our roadmap and towards our ultimate vision.

• Make key product decisions alongside the team, informed by user research, intuition and business need

• Design features users will love

• Work closely and collaboratively with engineering, including joining our weekly sprint planning sessions to help prioritize what we’re shipping

• Set design culture and guide/mentor other team members on best practices for UX and brand.

We’re early stage, so you'll have an outsized equity stake and an unparalleled opportunity to shape the product direction.

Our Team

Check out this Instagram highlight reel

We’re a small, but mighty team with backgrounds in big tech, as startup founders and as early members at successful startups. We’ve come together around a shared vision and are dedicated to creating important and positive experiences for cyberspace.

We're well resourced (unannounced rounds) & backed by top-tier investors, including the backers of companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, Snap, and Twitter, as well as the founders of companies like Zynga, VSCO, and Scale and the people behind artists like Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, Lorde, Logic, and Panic! At The Disco, and many others. Our team is advised by the founders of Pinterest, Dubsmash (now Reddit), as well as pioneers of digital marketing and market design from Harvard.

We care about building a genuinely diverse team. We are a majority-first gen immigrant team and sponsor visas — we think that’s important as we build towards enabling easier digital migration. We share the same values of individuality, empathy, reliability, kindness and humility. One big overlap among our life experiences is contrasts: contrasts between our own upbringing and the world around us, contrasts between what was expected of us and what we ended up pursuing and our bringing together of contrasting, interdisciplinary worlds.

We believe magic happens in person. We're NY-based, with a spacious studio in West Soho.

More about us here.

Ideal Candidate

💡 We recognize that the confidence gap and imposter syndrome might discourage amazing candidates from applying. Every job description is a wish list, so please reach out if this role really excites you.

You’re likely a good fit if you:

Consumer product design experience: You should have significant experience designing consumer product experiences, and you should be familiar with UX best practices. We’ll want to learn from your experiences, so you should have a perspective on what makes consumer product experiences magical.

Five+ years experience: As a small startup, there’s a lot of room for growth but not a lot of bandwidth for direct design mentorship. We’re prioritizing candidates with 5+ years in design. We use Figma for most things, and Spline for 3D modeling — although don’t expect extensive experience with these tools (Spline was founded in 2020 lol).

Team: You are a designer who wants to design great products and contribute to a great team. At koodos labs, we know that early teammates set the culture years into the future. You should be committed to the startup journey, have a perspective on what makes great design and what makes a great team — and you should care deeply about holding both product and teams to a high standard. We are an in-person team in New York and believe that being together IRL is an important part of setting the right pace, level of collaboration and culture early on.

Ownership: You’re ready to take end-to-end responsibility for product design. You know what makes a frictionless user experience, and you’re excited to collab with engineering to bring your designs to production.

Learning: You are comfortable building early-stage products and taking action with imperfect information. The market is changing rapidly, and we need to respond to change without running in circles. You should be comfortable adapting rapidly while remaining focused on a goal.

Individuality: You bring a unique perspective to the team. We want anyone in the world to be able to use our products, so we approach diversity and inclusion seriously and thoughtfully. We recognize that bringing together different perspectives and backgrounds helps build stronger teams and products.

Startup Experience: You know that building great companies takes a lot of work. Seed-stage companies can offer some of the most challenging, invigorating, and rewarding experiences in tech — quite simply, koodos labs is different from Big Tech. It helps if you’ve experienced the ups and downs of startup life before, but so long as you’re excited for an adventure, we’re excited to have you join.

Here are some quotes from team members around what they want to see:

• “Have strong intuition on what to focus on, and what not to”

• “I want to be able to say ‘WOWza how did you create that flow so fast?! It’s genius!’”

• “Put ego aside when making decisions: not take design feedback personally”

• “Are comfortable with ambiguity”

• “Can see into the future and understand how the product and design should evolve”

• “Generate quick yet thoughtful solutions when faced with constraints”

• “Practice leading without authority”

What you'll do

Day 1: You’ll talk to your first user alongside our UXR lead and get the lowdown on masterplan + roadmap.

Day 7: You’ll make your your first contribution to our design files. We believe in learning-by-doing, so you’ll likely jump right in and make a small change to a page or feature, and pass it onto engineering during our sprint planning session. We’ll make sure you have support at every step along the way.

Day 30: You’ll assume responsibility for end-to-end design, be a core contributor to our sprint planning sessions and on roadmap prioritization. We have an ownership culture, so as soon as you’re familiar with user needs, our product and roadmap, we’ll put you in charge!

In the Future: You’ll become a senior leader at koodos labs, either as a people manager or an individual contributor. We expect the early team to grow into high-impact roles as the company scales.

How we interview

We lean heavily on prior experience, demonstrated ability, and references.

Interviews: We start the interview process with a discussion to hear more about your prior experience and goals, and to tell you more about koodos labs.

If we both think there’s a potential fit, we’d be keen to understand your product design experience a little better. We may ask you to record a Loom video talking through a specific project you worked on that demonstrates your product design skill and how you prioritize.

The 2nd interview would then be a 45-minute free-flowing whiteboarding session in Figma on your feedback on Shelf. This’ll give us both a sense of what it’s like to jam! We’ll move straight into final stage onsite after this.

Onsite: We’ll invite you to meet the team at our office in West Soho! It’ll be a series of discussions with team members and an opportunity to grab lunch with us 🙂

References: After the interview stage, we ask for 2-3 references who would be willing to discuss their experiences working with you. We’ll make sure to be respectful of their time; most calls take about 15 minutes.

Decision: This part’s on us, and we promise to move fast.

How to apply

If interested, please drop us a line on joinus@koodos.com with your resume and portfolio.

FAQs

• What about compensation?

  150-200K with >1% equity.

• Where will I work?

  koodos labs is based out of New York City. We default to in-office and are typically in Monday, Tuesday and Friday with the option of WFH other days. Our office is based in West Soho at 515 Greenwich Street.

• Are you hiring interns?

  We’re excited to hire early-career teammates as we scale, but right now we’re solving for fast, high-quality execution with high ownership, so we aren’t hiring interns in the near future.

• Are you open to part-time?

  All our roles are full-time. Things move very quickly in the early days of a startup, so it's important all team members are full-time and able to respond to issues as they arise.

• Where can I find more info?

  Reach out to joinus@koodos.com with any other questions.

• Do you sponsor visas?

  YES! We actually do. Our team is mostly made up of immigrants or first-gen Americans.

• What stack do you use?

  Our design stack is Figma, Spline for 3D graphics, Adobe Illustrator for icons, Origami for some prototyping and Framer for landing pages.

  Our tech stack is React and Postgres (via Supabase).We also rely on Next.js, tRPC, Capacitor, Typescript.