THE ROLE
We're hiring our first design leader to own how people experience our brand and
products, starting with Iris, our climate risk platform. Iris turns
engineering-grade hazard and damage modeling into decisions made by executives,
operations teams, finance leaders, and consultants, most of whom are not risk
modelers. The core of this role is translation: taking outputs that are
technically defensible and making them understandable, trustworthy, and
actionable for the people who need to act on them.
Much of your time will go to the Iris experience: how complex results unfold for
different roles, how confidence and uncertainty are communicated, how
recommendations connect to action, and how we design the journey from
understanding risk to actually reducing it. Scores with no confidence behind
them no longer survive scrutiny in this industry; design that earns trust is
part of the product, not decoration. User experience, interaction, and visual
design all work together here, in service of one thing: convincing and enabling
people to act on the insights.
The brand is the thread that ties it all together. The way risk reads in a
report, a one-pager, or a conference booth should be the same language a
customer meets inside the product. You'll build that unified visual and
narrative system across our website, collateral, case studies, and templates:
the machinery that lets a small company feel bigger than its footprint and gives
our go-to-market real leverage. One seat holds the product and the brand because
a customer's external impression and their in-product experience should
reinforce each other.
ABOUT YOU
You're a designer who has grown into a leader without losing the craft. You've
led the design of complex, data-heavy products, ideally while also owning the
brand around them, and you know why keeping the two coherent matters. You think
in systems: design languages, component libraries, templates that others can run
with. But you got there by being excellent at the details first.
You're drawn to complexity on behalf of the people who have to navigate it:
turning dense, technical, high-stakes data into insights a non-expert can
understand, defend, and act on. You want to work close to the engineers,
experts, and data scientists making the product decisions, not in a studio at
arm's length from them.
You're comfortable being the most senior design voice in the room at a small
company: setting direction, giving other designers a clear system to execute
within, and being accountable for the result. And the mission matters to you,
not as a slogan but as the reason to spend your next years on this problem.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
* Own design direction across Class 3: one coherent system from product to
brand
* Build the experiences that will drive adaptation and resilience decisions at
scale: understanding risk, comparing options, and acting on recommendations
* Set the experience architecture across our products, starting with Iris:
role-specific flows, progressive disclosure of complex results, narrative
outputs, onboarding, and reporting
* Design how trust shows up across all our experiences: provenance,
uncertainty, and defensibility made visible
* Build and document our brand identity: visual language, voice, and the
templates and collateral that carry it, including website, one-pagers, case
studies, conference materials, newsletters, and event presence
* Equip our go-to-market: strong leave-behinds, follow-up materials, and
campaign assets that make every customer conversation land better
* Work directly with the founding team, Product, and Marketing; design at Class
3 sits at the table, not downstream of it
* Use AI-enabled design and prototyping workflows as everyday instruments, so
iteration speed is not limited by headcount
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
* 8+ years in design with real leadership scope, spanning user experience,
interaction, and visual design
* Experience designing complex, data-heavy products that turn technical
material into actionable insights for non-expert decision-makers, in climate,
risk, science, finance, or an adjacent domain
* A portfolio that shows the range: shipped product and identity systems, with
the thinking behind why each works
* Fluency in modern design tooling (Figma, component-based systems) and genuine
curiosity about AI-assisted design workflows
* Strong writer: narrative and microcopy are part of the system, not someone
else's job
* Experience directing other designers or external partners without doing all
the execution yourself
* US-based; able to be in NYC or SF regularly
FIRST 90 DAYS
* Absorb the domain: the product, the models behind it, the customers, and how
they make decisions
* Audit everything a customer touches (product, brand, site, collateral)
* Put a v1 of the unified design in place
* Develop and initiate user research and customer feedback validation loop
* Frame the design direction for the next iteration of the adaptation and
decision journey in Iris, and ship it with the rest of our product
development team
* Ship collateral for our upcoming events and customer-facing materials that
visibly raises the bar
WHY JOIN US
We're building something that matters. Natural disasters already cost tens of
billions of dollars every year, and the toll on our physical infrastructure
keeps rising. At Class 3, design is not packaging: it's how engineering-grade
intelligence becomes decisions that protect real assets and real communities.
You'll be our first design leader, setting the experiential and visual
foundation for everything that comes after. Our customers already make
meaningful decisions based on our insights; your work shapes how those decisions
get made. The rare part is the combination: a genuinely hard translation
problem, a mission with tangible impact, and a foundation few designers get to
set.
* Competitive salary - $150,000-$190,000 base and equity
* Health, dental, and vision insurance
* 401(k)
* Flexible PTO
* Flexible, remote-first work environment
Class 3 Technologies is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity
and are committed to building an inclusive environment for all employees,
regardless of race, gender, age, religion, identity, or experience.