Founding Designer

Why this role

Concourse is building the operating system for State and Local governments. Our platform is a configurable approach to tackling fragmented government data and workflows and turning them into smooth operations for public servants and the constituents they serve. As a Concourse Product Designer, you're not just designing screens for a single product, you're defining the design language of the public sector.

You will own the foundational layer of the interface: the tokens, primitives, components, motion, and patterns that everything above them is built on. Your role is to empower our Forward-Deployed PMs who sit alongside city and county teams, understand their specific workflows, and assemble each agency's solution. A bail management system for a county courthouse. The IT Helpdesk for a school district. A water utility operations dashboard. A financial aid application. Your job is to make sure that no matter the problem space, using the product is intuitive and feels unmistakably like Concourse.

You're working on the design questions that make every deployment possible: how to model any government process in a set of primitives constrained enough for a non-engineer to assemble, how to make a fourteen-step statutory review feel simple to someone filling it out on a phone during their lunch break, how to hold a pixel standard across hundreds of deployments with different audiences and mandates.

These are hard, unsolved problems. Nobody has designed public services at this scale with these tools. The person who gets it right sets what government software feels like for the next decade.

What You'll Do

• Define the design language of Concourse: the conventions every product inherits, from casing and form patterns to error and empty states, motion, and authentication flows

• Create flexible components FDPMs can leverage, configurable enough to model many workflows and constrained enough that a non-engineer can assemble a product without breaking the standard

• Own the design library every Concourse product is built on, from tokens and primitives through components, motion, templates, and documentation

• Ship all of it as production front-end code, built with AI agents alongside engineers, rather than as Figma files for somebody else to interpret

• Find elegant solutions for complicated government workflows: multi-approver reviews, conditional fee schedules, statutory deadlines, and legacy data models that were never designed to be seen by the public

What We're Looking For

• A portfolio: what have you shipped end-to-end, under real client pressure, with real constraints?

• Hands-on experience using AI coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Factory, etc.) as a core part of your daily workflow, with a strong sense of what AI can and will be able to do

• High-agency, high-velocity mindset with an exceptional work ethic

• 5+ years of product design experience, including early-stage startup experience

• A design system you've built or substantially shaped that held up across more than one product; you design for the case you haven't seen yet

• Comfort in extreme ambiguity; a project often starts with a statute, a screenshot of a 20-year-old system, and a partner who can't fully articulate what they need

• Pixel-level standards alongside systems thinking

• Comfort with code as your deliverable; Figma can be a thinking tool here, but it is not the output

• Strong relationship-building skills with non-technical stakeholders; you can sit with a county clerk or a school IT director and turn their workflow into an interface

• US citizen or work authorization

• Willing to work in-person in Flatiron, NYC (5 days/week)