Product Designer

The research industry is massive (>$140B and growing) and ripe for disruption. Incumbents are outdated, slow, and burdened by high-cost services. That's our opportunity.

Outset is backed by top Silicon Valley investors and raised a $30M Series B in December 2025—less than six months after our Series A—led by Radical Ventures with participation from M12 (Microsoft’s venture arm), 8VC, Y Combinator, and Adverb Ventures.

We're looking for an experienced product designer to join our small team and own meaningful parts of the Outset product. A significant part of your purview will be our Digital Twins / Simulations Lab—a new 0→1 product we're building alongside the core platform—though the work will reach across the product as the team's needs evolve.

Simulations are deep tech. Underneath the product are models, data pipelines, and research methods built by our scientists, and presenting a complex product with simplicity and intuitiveness is critical. You'll need to be curious about what's happening under the hood, patient enough to understand it, and sharp enough to translate it into product experiences that a researcher can grasp quickly.

You'll work closely with our Head of Design, PMs, Sales, and Engineering to understand what we're building and how we're selling it, and to make sure the product reflects both.

Newer parts of the product, Simulations especially, are being actively shaped by customer feedback and competitive dynamics. We're looking for someone who holds a high bar for craft without being precious about their own work as we iterate.

So much has changed about what it means to do "design work." The toolkit has expanded to include tools like Codex and Claude Design, and our team spends as much time generating and molding prototypes as organizing canvases in Figma. Technical fluency is a major plus here, but strong opinions, taste, and a track record of shipping are what matter most.

You'll join a small design team and own projects from the kernel of an idea to a feature customers use every day, working directly with our founders and, on simulations work, the scientists building the lab.

Responsibilities

• Own product surfaces end to end. Take projects from early concepts through launch and iteration, including a central role in our Simulations work.
• Simplify technical complexity. Dig into how our simulations and other systems actually work, then design experiences that make the output legible and trustworthy to researchers.
• Stay close to customers. Sit in on customer conversations, read the feedback, and turn it into design decisions quickly.
• Hold a high bar for craft. Produce wireframes, interaction designs and high-fidelity visuals, and sweat the details in the shipped product.
• Know what not to build. Question features that add complexity without adding much value, and help the team cut scope down to what matters most.

Qualifications

• We don't have many explicit requirements, and exceptional candidates might bend these rules.
• 5+ years of product design industry experience, ideally including time as the lead or founding designer on a product or major product area.
• Experience taking a product from 0 to 1, or working in an early-stage environment where the direction changed often.
• Genuine curiosity about technically complex systems, and a track record of designing clear products on top of them.
• Comfort working directly with customers and treating their feedback as a primary input to design.
• Exceptional communication skills.
• Strong but loosely held opinions on design and product.

Preferred Qualifications

• Comfort designing in code—building prototypes with real data, or shipping frontend changes alongside engineers.
• Experience building enterprise software.
• Experience building in the research industry.