About Search Atlas

Search Atlas is pioneering agentic marketing - AI that doesn’t just recommend what to do, but executes. We’ve built a platform that manages over $1B in ad spend, indexes 100B+ backlinks and 50B+ keywords, and serves thousands of customers from SMBs to enterprises. We bootstrapped to $30M ARR with ~250 employees.

This is a rare opportunity to build the design function at a company with real revenue, real data, and real product-market fit, not a pre-revenue startup guessing at product direction.

The Role

We’re hiring our first VP of Product Design to own the end-to-end product experience across the Search Atlas platform. You’ll report directly to the CEO/CTO and be responsible for building a world-class design function from the ground up.

This is not a “make it pretty” role. You’ll be accountable for product outcomes - conversion rates, activation, retention, and the overall experience quality of an AI-native platform that’s creating a new category.

Why This Role Exists Now

Here’s a concrete example of the problem you’ll solve on day one:

Our trial-to-paid conversion rate has declined meaningfully over the past year. UI/UX changes were made over time, but they were never logged, versioned, or tested systematically. We can’t tell exactly what caused the decline. The person we hire will:

Forensically audit the trial onboarding flow using session recordings, funnel analytics, and archived versions of the product
Identify the specific UX regressions that contributed to the decline
Design and execute a plan to meaningfully improve trial-to-paid conversion
Build the design ops infrastructure (version control, A/B testing, change logs) so this kind of blind spot never happens again

If that kind of diagnostic, metrics-driven design leadership excites you, keep reading.

What You’ll Own

Product Design Vision: Define and own the design language, interaction patterns, and experience architecture for an agentic AI platform - interfaces where AI executes tasks autonomously and users need transparency, control, and trust.
Design System: Build a scalable, component-based design system purpose-built for agentic interfaces, covering everything from AI status indicators and confidence displays to human-in-the-loop intervention patterns.
Design Ops: Establish the processes, QA workflows, versioning, and A/B testing frameworks that turn design from an ad hoc function into a disciplined, measurable practice.
User Research: Build a lightweight but rigorous research practice that informs the product roadmap - understanding how marketers, agencies, and SMBs interact with AI-driven workflows.
Team Building: Grow and lead the design team from 1–2 designers today to a high-performing group that can support a rapidly scaling product portfolio.
Conversion & Activation: Own the full trial-to-paid and onboarding experience, with direct accountability for improving conversion, activation, and retention metrics.

What We’re Looking For

Required

8+ years in product design, with 3+ years leading design teams at B2B SaaS companies
Track record of directly improving product metrics (conversion, activation, retention) through design.
Experience building design functions or teams from early stage (sub-10 designers)
Strong portfolio demonstrating systems thinking: design systems, component libraries, interaction patterns at scale
Comfort operating as a player-coach: hands-on in Figma one hour, showing metrics to rest of leadership the next
Experience with design ops: versioning, change management, QA processes, A/B testing frameworks
Analytical fluency - comfortable in Amplitude, Mixpanel, or similar tools; able to read funnel data and form hypotheses independently

Strongly Preferred

Meaningful experience designing AI-native or ML-driven product interfaces, especially agentic UX patterns (autonomous execution, confidence indicators, human oversight models)
Experience with marketing technology, SEO, or advertising platforms
Background working in bootstrapped or capital-efficient environments where design resources were scarce and impact had to be outsized
Familiarity with front-end implementation (enough to prototype or evaluate technical feasibility, not necessarily production code)

What This Role Is Not

A pure management role - you’ll be hands-on designing, especially in the first 6–12 months
A rebrand or marketing design job - this is product design, focused on the application experience
A role where you wait for specs - you’ll be expected to proactively identify UX problems and bring data to the conversation

Compensation & Benefits

Base Salary: $200K–$250K base + equity
Benefits: Fully covered health, vision, and dental insurance, 401(k), Flexible PTO, Personal development budget, Pet Health Insurance
Work Model: Hybrid - San Francisco, CA

Why Search Atlas

Category creation: You’d be designing the UX patterns for “agentic marketing” - a product category that barely exists yet. The design decisions you make will define how marketers interact with autonomous AI.
Real scale, real data: $30M ARR, 100B+ backlinks indexed, $1B in ad spend under management. You’re not designing for a hypothetical product - you’re optimizing something that thousands of customers already use daily.
Founder access: You report directly to the CEO/CTO. No layers between you and the technical and strategic decision-maker.
Bootstrapped discipline: We built this without institutional capital, which means every design decision has to earn its place. If you thrive in high-ownership, low-bureaucracy environments, this is your role.
Equity upside: Leadership hires get meaningful equity in a company with proven revenue and trajectory.

Interview Process

Introductory call with recruiting
Portfolio review + design philosophy conversation with CEO/CTO
Case study: Diagnose a real conversion problem using anonymized product data
Team and cross-functional interviews
Offer and reference checks

VP of Product Design

Build the design function. Own the product experience. Move the metrics.