The Role

You'll lead design for the software our field teams actually carry with them on shift: underground, in the pit, wherever the work is happening. Not the dashboards. Not the back-office tools. The stuff that has to work in someone's hands while they're doing a physically demanding job.

Field software is a completely different design challenge, and it's the one we haven't cracked yet. If you've ever designed a mobile product that had to survive contact with the real world - gloves, glare, noise, motion, bad connectivity, someone glancing at a screen for two seconds mid-task - you understand the challenge ahead.

This is where design stops being a polish layer and starts being the adoption strategy. We're not shipping to a few hundred office users who'll sit through onboarding. We're shipping to a large, distributed, non-desk-bound workforce - if the product doesn't respect the physical reality of their job, they simply won't use it. While we're starting with mining, we won't stop there; it'll be the start of several industries that we plan to bring this platform into. You won't just design for our current customer; you'll build the foundational design system and language for how Skiffra shows up on a physical, high-stakes job site, period. That system is what makes it possible to expand into new verticals fast, instead of re-solving the same problems from scratch every time.
What You'll Do

Build the System

• Establish a design system for field products that scales across many use cases while staying simple enough for immediate, low-friction use
• Set the design standards and vocabulary that future product lines and future designers will build on
• Elevate existing product surfaces opportunistically: administrative tools, voice-based agents, and more

Design for the Field

• Design for glove-on interaction: touch targets, gestures, and input patterns that hold up when fingers are covered and dexterity is reduced
• Design for ambient noise: interfaces that don't rely on voice as the sole channel, and voice interactions that work in high-noise environments
• Design for color, brightness, and display extremes: adaptive UI across indoor, underground, and open-pit light conditions, with layouts and contrast that stay legible in direct sunlight
• Design for situational usability: workers who are moving, wearing PPE, managing physical tasks, and can only glance at a screen for a few seconds at a time
• Build for natural, low-friction adoption across a workforce with varying tech familiarity, working conditions, and shift patterns. Adoption is a design outcome, not a training or rollout problem
• Prototype in Figma or a higher-fidelity tool (ProtoPie, Framer) for interactions that need to feel real: glare/contrast states, offline states, gesture-based flows

Founding-Level Impact

• Collaborate closely with product, engineering, on-site delivery teams, and client operations stakeholders
• Conduct on-site field research to understand real working conditions, not just remote user interviews
• Influence design standards, hiring, and culture as our first dedicated field-product design hire

What We're Looking For

• 7+ years of product design experience, including senior or lead ownership of at least one 01 or major redesign effort
• Strong systems thinking, with the ability to build a design system that scales across many field use cases
• Comfort designing for mobile/handheld and ruggedized hardware form factors
• Comfort reading/editing basic HTML/CSS or React components
• Familiarity with mobile design systems and native platform conventions (iOS HIG, Material), plus when to break from them for ruggedized/field use
• Some exposure to design tokens and how they map to a real component library (so their system survives contact with engineering)
• Comfort operating in zero-to-one environments with evolving requirements
• Clear communicator who can translate messy, real-world constraints into simple, usable design decisions

Nice to Have

• Direct experience designing for frontline, field, industrial, or physically-constrained environments (e.g., construction, logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, energy, oil & gas, mining, warehousing) rather than purely office-based SaaS
• Background in industrial, mining, energy, or heavy-industry sectors
• Experience designing safety-critical software where usability errors carry real physical risk
• Familiarity with voice interface design
• Prior experience as a founding or early design hire

How We Work

We value speed, clarity, and technical rigor. We favor simple systems over clever ones, prototypes over over-planning, and ownership over handoffs. You'll work directly with founders and ship things that matter quickly.

Location & Work Model

This is a hybrid role with regular in-person collaboration in Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay Area. We are not a remote-only company.

Work Authorization

Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States. We are not able to offer visa sponsorship for this role.

Benefits & Eligibility

This position is eligible for Skiffra's standard benefits, including health insurance and retirement plans, and may also qualify for participation in the Company's bonus and incentive programs.