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Job Description
I'm building a company called Explorers. The launch product is called Lodestar, a live model of a small or mid-sized business that provides intelligence and takes action. The primary interface is a conversation, not a screen. It works across media as one continuous presence.
Lodestar is the first thing we're building but not the only thing. Explorers will be a portfolio of products, surfaces, and physical environments designed for the same SMB customer, and all of them have to feel like they came from the same place. We're at the formative stage, which is the reason for this post.
I'm looking for a creative partner to own the design DNA, the sensibility that runs through everything we make, build, write, and ship. The job is to hold a single idea steady across surfaces and across people, including senior, opinionated people pulling in different directions.
What makes the role unusual isn't any one product. It's the range. We're inventing interaction patterns for AI-native products that don't yet have an established grammar. We're designing for emotional registers that traditional software design doesn't often consider, like calm, trust, and the feeling of being honestly told the score. And we're doing it across products, brand, communications, and spaces, with a team including senior operators, cutting-edge engineers, AI and math people, and hospitality operators. The creative partner threads a sympathy throughout.
AI fluency is a filter, not a bonus. We're an AI company. If you treat AI tools as a multiplier on your craft and have a point of view about how an organization should design with them, we're aligned.
The reference points that make sense here are closer to Eliot Noyes at IBM, or the better hospitality and retail design practices that think in choreography and atmosphere, than to standard product design. The right person has probably done meaningful work across product, brand, and physical environment already. Maybe that's a partner at a small multi-disciplinary studio, or a Chief Design Officer at a company they've outgrown, or a senior figure at one of the big firms looking for a more interesting problem, or the founder of a design-led practice in adjacent territory.
In other words, maybe that's you.
If the question "what should it feel like when AI is in the room with the people running real businesses" gets you forward in your seat, we should talk. Email [email protected].