Founding Product Designer

About Upsoma

Upsoma is building an AI-native platform for personalized learning and skill development.

Most learning platforms tell people what content to consume. Upsoma is designed to answer a more important set of questions:

What do you already know? What are you missing? What should you learn next -- and why?

We combine Skill Graphs, Skill Telemetry, readiness assessment, adaptive learning paths, practice, and progress signals to create learning experiences that respond to each learner as they grow.

Our MVP is live and already functional. It has been built by a highly technical founding team, and we are now preparing for the next stage: turning a strong technical product into an exceptional product experience.

We are looking for a Founding Product Designer to lead that transformation.

The Role

You will own the evolution of Upsoma's product experience ahead of our MVP launch and beyond.

This is not a role where you will be handed perfectly formed requirements and asked to make screens look better.

You will work directly with the founders and engineers to understand the product, challenge existing experiences, simplify complex workflows, establish a coherent design system, and take features from early ideas through to production-ready designs.

Your immediate focus will be auditing and redesigning the existing platform around our core product capabilities:

• Skill Graph -- helping learners understand how skills connect and what comes next.
• Skill Telemetry -- turning learning activity into meaningful signals about capability and readiness.
• Adaptive Learning -- creating learning journeys that evolve as learners progress.

You will have significant influence over what Upsoma looks like, how it feels, and how learners understand and trust the product.

What You'll Do

Own the Product Experience

• Audit the existing Upsoma product and identify the highest-impact UX and UI improvements.
• Redesign key learner journeys from onboarding through skill assessment, learning, practice, and progress.
• Turn complex product concepts into simple, intuitive experiences.
• Design flows for areas such as career goals, skill discovery, readiness assessments, adaptive pathways, learning sessions, dashboards, and progress.
• Take product ideas from rough concepts to user flows, prototypes, polished interfaces, and production-ready specifications.
• Continuously improve moments where learners need clarity and confidence -- particularly understanding where they are, what they need to improve, and what they should do next.

Build the Upsoma Design System

• Establish and evolve a scalable visual language across the product.
• Define consistent typography, spacing, layout, colour, motion, interaction states, and responsive behaviour.
• Create reusable patterns and components for navigation, cards, graphs, dashboards, forms, learning content, assessments, and feedback states.
• Maintain high visual consistency across desktop and mobile experiences.
• Ensure the product feels cohesive across learning, marketing, pricing, careers, and other product surfaces.

Raise Product Quality

• Work closely with engineers throughout implementation rather than handing designs over and disappearing.
• Review shipped experiences and identify visual or interaction gaps.
• Establish a lightweight design QA process.
• Use learner feedback, product analytics, and usability observations to continuously improve the experience.
• Help the team develop stronger product and design instincts as Upsoma grows.

What We're Looking For

You are likely a strong fit if:

• You have strong experience designing modern web, SaaS, or digital products.
• You have exceptional product taste and a portfolio that demonstrates polished, shipped work.
• You can make complex workflows feel remarkably simple.
• You are highly proficient in Figma, including components, variants, prototyping, and design systems.
• You can move comfortably between UX thinking and detailed visual design.
• You care about typography, spacing, hierarchy, interaction, motion, responsive behaviour, and the details that make software feel exceptional.
• You can take loosely defined product ideas and independently turn them into thoughtful solutions.
• You are comfortable working directly with founders and engineers in a fast-moving environment.
• You communicate your reasoning clearly and can explain the why behind your design decisions.
• You are comfortable designing within real technical and product constraints rather than idealised scenarios.

Strong Signals

We would especially like to hear from you if you have:

• Designed and shipped an early-stage or MVP product.
• Redesigned an existing product rather than only designing products from scratch.
• Built or significantly contributed to a product design system.
• Experience with learning, education, career development, workforce technology, productivity, or AI-powered products.
• Experience visualising complex information such as graphs, progress, analytics, skills, relationships, or recommendations.
• Experience using AI tools to accelerate research, ideation, prototyping, or design workflows.
• Basic frontend knowledge and the ability to communicate effectively with React/Next.js engineers.
• A strong point of view on what makes products from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Linear, Stripe, Notion, or similar product-led companies feel refined.

None of these is individually required. Evidence of exceptional product thinking and craft matters more than checking every box.

What Success Looks Like

In the first phase of the engagement, we expect you to help us:

1. Audit the current Upsoma experience.
2. Identify and prioritise the most important usability and visual issues.
3. Establish a clearer product design direction.
4. Redesign the core MVP experiences around Skill Graph, Skill Telemetry, and Adaptive Learning.
5. Strengthen and document the product's design system.
6. Work closely with engineering to ensure the redesigned experience is implemented to a high standard.
7. Help us launch an MVP that feels intentional, intuitive, polished, and trustworthy.

Why Join Upsoma?

Shape the product early

The core technology exists, but many of the most important product and design decisions are still ahead of us. You will have meaningful influence over them.

Work directly with the founding team

You will collaborate closely with a small, highly technical team without layers of product management or bureaucracy.

Solve an interesting design problem

Upsoma sits at the intersection of AI, learning, skill intelligence, data visualisation, and adaptive user experiences. Making these systems understandable and delightful presents genuinely challenging product-design problems.

Build systems, not just screens

We want someone who thinks about the entire experience -- interaction patterns, components, motion, information architecture, feedback loops, and product behaviour.

Grow with the product

This will begin as a part-time engagement, with the potential to develop into a much larger role as the company and product grow.

How to Apply

Keep your application concise.

Please include:

• A link to your portfolio.
• Links to products or interfaces you have actually shipped.
• One example of a product experience where your work meaningfully improved clarity, usability, activation, conversion, engagement, or user confidence.
• A short explanation of the problem, what you changed, and why.

We care much more about the quality of your thinking and shipped work than the number of years on your CV.

Ready to Build With Us?

Help us create a product where learners don't simply consume content -- they understand their capabilities, see their gaps, and always know what to learn next.

Help us build the operating layer for AI-native skill acquisition.

Upsoma is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate candidates based on product thinking, craft, ownership, communication, and evidence of impact.