Founding Designer

Hone builds AI that owns outcomes, not tasks: agentic systems that work towards goals over weeks and months, deploy themselves, and improve over time.

About Hone

Models keep getting smarter, but outside of coding most organizations can't absorb that intelligence, and the gap between model capability and the value derived from it keeps widening. The reasons are many, from human incentives to org design, but at the core we think it's a technology problem. Hone builds engines: AI systems that you hand a goal, like "keep the recruiting pipeline healthy." An engine builds itself, maintains its own agents and code, pulls in people when it needs judgment, and learns from every correction.

In October 2026, we announced a $60M seed round from Benchmark and Index Ventures.

• Half our team are former founders: They’ve built companies, shipped products, and chosen Hone as the place to build next. The rest of us come from Cognition, Mercor, Ramp, Jane Street, Decagon, Brex and Harvey

• Our customers are building with AI themselves: Cognition, Modal and Lucanet already use Hone, with customer perspectives featured on our website

• Our founders have built from research to scale: They researched agents at Stanford, built the core of Devin at Cognition, led enterprise engineering at Mercor, built internal AI platforms, and founded companies that reached over one million users

• We measure our work by economic impact: Engines are deployed across revenue, procurement, risk, product and operations, and we judge them by the results they create, not benchmark scores

• Our values shape how we work: Own the Outcome, Set the Standard, Win with Class, and Commit to the Racing Line. Read more on our careers page

• Read more: Bloomberg, Index Ventures’ investment thesis, and our launch announcement

The Role

Engines work with many people for weeks or months and keep acting while no one is watching. There is no established interface vocabulary for that yet. As our first designer, you'll own the UX paradigms for agentic systems that are multiplayer, asynchronous and autonomous: product design end to end, the design system, and Hone's brand and marketing site.

What You'll Work On

• Engine onboarding, from an empty workspace to an engine that understands its job.

• One view of an engine that zooms from its full structure down to a single live decision.

• Autonomy that people dial up over time, legibly and reversibly, from approving every action to bounded autonomy.

• Corrections that land at the right level: one item, one person's preferences, the team default, or the engine itself.

• Memory and permission views at org and personal level.

• How an engine asks for judgment: when to interrupt, whom, and with how much context.

Requirements

• A strong portfolio of shipped product work with precise visual and interaction craft

• Time at a fast-growing startup

• You've built design from scratch: a design system, a brand, or both

• You've shipped with engineers to real users and kept iterating after launch

• You make complex, dense systems simple without hiding what matters

• You use AI tools every day to prototype and ship, and still own every detail

• You design for fun because you genuinely care about the craft

Nice to Have

• You code: you prototype or ship production UI and design-system code yourself

• You've designed agent, ML or developer-facing products

How We Hire

1. Intro call.

2. Portfolio deep dive.

3. Design deep dive.

4. One-day onsite in San Francisco.

5. References.

6. Offer.

Logistics

• Location: San Francisco, in person, Sunday to Friday.

• Compensation: Competitive salary + meaningful equity.

• Visa: We sponsor visas and support you through the immigration process.

• Benefits: Health and dental insurance, maternity and parental support, and relocation support.