Founding Designer
About Layer
Over the last decade, a vibrant ecosystem of SMB software tools has emerged to help SMBs manage and run their businesses. These tools help SMBs with everything from payments to payroll, but accounting has lagged behind. Small business owners are still struggling with disconnected, generic, accounting software and expensive bookkeepers.
At Layer, we’re building a new kind of accounting software and bookkeeping that lives within the existing software tools SMBs use every day. Our platform allows software companies to quickly launch modern accounting software and bookkeeping services to their SMB customers, eliminating the need for them to use legacy accounting tools or bookkeepers.
The Role
As our Founding Product Designer, you’ll own design for Layer’s embedded accounting products and help evolve our visual brand as we scale. You’ll set design strategy and own workstreams end to end across: product UX, interaction quality, design systems, and how our products show up inside our customers’ platforms. This role will partner directly with the CEO and collaborate closely with engineering to ship quickly, sweat details, and build remarkable experiences.
You will:
Own product design from concept to launch. Lead discovery, flows, IA, interaction design, and high-fidelity UI across Layer’s embedded accounting and bookkeeping experiences.
Design for our embedded model. Create patterns that are intuitive for SMB end users while remaining flexible enough to match the look of our platform customers’ products.
Evolve our design system. Expand and maintain Layer’s component library and guidelines in close partnership with engineering.
Work directly with our customers. Help our customers implement onboarding and marketing best practices surrounding our embedded UIs to launch successful accounting & bookkeeping products to their SMBs.
Own our website. Create visually striking web experiences that showcase our product and brand narrative.
Craft Marketing Visuals. Create engaging visual content for marketing launches and case studies.
Drive Branding. Ensure Layer’s brand remains visually compelling and competitive.
Skills & experience
This role will suit someone who loves diving into open ended challenges, moving with urgency, and owning outcomes end-to-end. If you’re invigorated by the idea fundamentally reimagining how accounting is done and helping small business owners, this role is for you.
We’re looking for candidates who have:
Excellent visual design craft and taste. You design elegant experiences that delight end users and hold a high bar for visual polish.
Systems thinking. You naturally design reusable patterns and can evolve a design system without slowing shipping velocity.
Deep Figma fluency. You live and breathe Figma. Components, variants, auto layout, etc. are all second nature.
Customer empathy & domain curiosity. You’re excited to dive into the world of accounting/bookkeeping and build deep empathy for both our platform customers and their SMB end-users.
Exceptional communication skills. You collaborate closely with engineers and feel comfortable explaining tradeoffs to customers.
You might be a great fit if you:
Have 5+ years of product design experience
Have been a first or early designer at an early-stage startup (or equivalent high-ownership experience)
Have designed SaaS or Fintech products used by SMBs
Designed brands and public websites from the ground up