Founding Product Designer

Chalk is building the data platform that powers the future of machine learning applications. We tear down complexity, latency, and scale barriers that have traditionally constrained ML capabilities. Our platform combines Rust-speed performance with elegant tools that developers love to use. Leading companies depend on Chalk for everything from stopping fraudulent credit card swipes, verifying identities, and maximizing clean energy capture.

About the role

We’re looking for our Founding Product Designer to help define how engineers, data scientists, and ML practitioners interact with Chalk across our web and CLI tools.

As a founding designer, you’ll join us full-time, in-office, and early—shaping not just our product, but our visual language, interaction patterns, and design standards from the ground up.

You’ll collaborate with Chalk’s founders, engineers, and customers to turn complex data infrastructure and workflows into clean, intuitive interfaces. If you love turning gnarly back-end power into smooth front-end magic and are eager to deliver designs weekly, we’d love to meet you.

We work in-person Monday through Friday in our SF office. We don’t currently offer remote or hybrid positions.

What you will do

• Work directly with engineers and founders to navigate the problem space, define requirements, prototype solutions, and ship polished experiences (we do not have product managers)
• Own UI/UX end-to-end, from concept to high-fidelity mocks to implementation
• Actively gather feedback from peers and users (mostly engineers and data scientists) to validate designs and rapidly iterate
• Balance speed and polish, with a bias to making pragmatic trade-offs to ship fast and learn
• Help start the design system: components, patterns, and principles that scale with the team
• Within your first 7 days, ship designs ready for implementation

What we’re looking for

• 3+ years of full-time design experience
• Portfolio that showcases shipped work
• Comfort building for an engineering persona, with enough technical literacy to discuss APIs, data flows, and constraints
• A collaborative mindset – low ego about your designs and open to feedback
• Strong communication skills – articulate design decisions clearly and ask clarifying questions to align on context or feedback
• Ability to work autonomously in a fast-paced environment, where “just enough process” is the goal and without a formal PM structure or formal product documentation
• Fluent in Figma
• Experience designing for developer tools or data-heavy B2B products
• Familiarity with SQL, Python, data engineering, or machine-learning workflows
• Dabbled with front-end code (HTML/CSS, React, or Type Script)

️Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance

Retirement savings

15 company holidays each year

️15 days of personal time off each year

Flex Commuter Benefits

Daily lunch and dinner on Chalk

Office is fully-stocked with drinks and snacks to fuel your work day.

️ Staying late? Dinner is on us

Staying even later? Grab an Uber / Lyft home on Chalk

Compensation

Range:
Salary + Equity based on experience

Actual compensation awarded to successful candidates will be based on several factors, including individual qualifications objectively assessed during the interview process.

Our comprehensive total package plays a major role in how we recognize individuals for the impact they will have on Chalk’s growth and us achieving our goals.

Chalk offers early team member equity and competitive benefits package in addition to the cash compensation.

Inclusivity

Chalk is an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and inclusion and provide reasonable accommodations to anyone in need of individualized support.

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