---
title: 'Founding Designer at Emergence Capital Partners'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-designer-emergence-capital-partners-san-francisco-9vams4b8es74'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# Founding Designer at Emergence Capital Partners

- **Company:** Emergence Capital Partners
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2025-12-22
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/emergence-capital-partners/bcf44398-c258-4cd6-8336-fa05846171fa

## Job description

## About the Role

We're designing the interfaces for a new generation of AI products. You'll shape how users interact with complex systems – making powerful technology feel simple, intuitive, and trustworthy. Designing for AI presents unique challenges: How do you help users understand what the AI is doing? How do you build trust when outputs are probabilistic? How do you create workflows that leverage AI capabilities without overwhelming users? You'll be solving these problems daily, defining interaction patterns that don't exist yet. This is a high-ownership role. You'll be the design voice in the room, working directly with founders, engineers, and customers to define what we build. You should be comfortable with ambiguity, excited by constraints, and motivated by shipping products that real people use.

## What You'll Do

- Own product design end-to-end: user research, information architecture, interaction design, and visual design
- Define interaction patterns for AI-native workflows, surfacing AI capabilities, handling uncertainty, and building user trust
- Create wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity designs that communicate product vision clearly
- Conduct user research – interviews, usability testing, data analysis and translate insights into product decisions
- Build and maintain design systems that enable consistent, high-quality UI across the product
- Work closely with engineers through implementation, ensuring design quality in the final product
- Define a clear UX vision and strategy for how enterprise users interact with AI-powered workflows, balancing innovation with usability
- Contribute to product strategy and roadmap discussions as a key voice in what we build

## Qualifications

- 4+ years of product design experience, with a portfolio demonstrating taste and end-to-end product design work
- Experience designing complex workflows, data-heavy applications, or enterprise software
- Strong proficiency in Figma and other AI tools, including rapid prototyping/wireframing and design systems
- Solid understanding of interaction design principles and ability to create intuitive user experiences
- Experience conducting user research and translating findings into actionable design decisions
- Excellent visual design skills with attention to typography, color, spacing, and hierarchy
- Have owned design systems and shipped features, not just concepts
- Strong communication skills, ability to articulate design rationale and collaborate effectively with engineers and PMs
- Comfort with ambiguity and rapid iteration in a fast-moving startup environment

## Nice to Have

- Experience designing AI-powered products or features
- Background in designing B2B or enterprise applications
- Experience at an early-stage startup or designing 0→1 products that will serve massive deployments to large enterprises
- Familiarity with front-end development (HTML, CSS, React) to facilitate engineer collaboration
- Domain expertise in financial services, legal, healthcare, or other enterprise verticals
- Experience building and scaling design systems from scratch and have scaled it across multiple surfaces (app, web, and brand)

## About Emergence Capital Partners

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Emergence Capital is a venture capital firm that partners with early-stage enterprise SaaS founders to build iconic cloud companies.
- **Entity Type**: Private (venture capital firm)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2003
- **Founders**: Jason Green, Brian Jacobs, Gordon Ritter

## Core Business
- Primary industry: Venture Capital (early-stage enterprise SaaS investment)
- Target customers: B2B enterprise technology startups (founders and management teams)
- Mission or purpose statement: “To help build the next generation of enterprise cloud companies that change the way the world works.” [emcap.com](https://www.emcap.com/thoughts/hiring-for-our-values)

## Products & Services
- **Venture Capital Funding**: Provides early-stage (Series A/B) capital to enterprise SaaS companies; typically invests in 5–7 new companies per year with a high-touch, low-volume approach. [emcap.com](https://www.emcap.com/)
- **Portfolio Support Services**: Offers go-to-market expertise, talent sourcing (via a dedicated job board), and strategic advice through the full company lifecycle. [emcap.com/about](https://www.emcap.com/about)
- **AI-Native Services (AINS) Playbook**: A framework and expertise for investing in “companies that sell outcomes rather than software” – a focus area as AI unlocks new business models. [emcap.com](https://www.emcap.com/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available (VC firm valuation is not disclosed).
- **Key Metrics**: Over $9B in realized returns on less than $2.5B invested. Over 90% of early-stage investments successfully raised follow-on rounds and over 20% later surpassed $1B in valuation. [emcap.com](https://www.emcap.com/)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Founders/Partners include Gordon Ritter, Santi Subotovsky, Jake Saper, Kevin Spain, Yaz El-Baba, and others; the firm has zero partner turnover since founding. [emcap.com/team](https://www.emcap.com/team)
- **Growth Signals**: Raised sixth core fund (ECP VI) and Opportunity Fund I; crossed 100th investment; portfolio includes public companies like Zoom, Doximity, Blend, and notable acquisitions like Chorus and Openpath. [emcap.com](https://www.emcap.com/thoughts/hiring-for-our-values)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Hyper-focused thesis**: Concentrates exclusively on early-stage enterprise SaaS, allowing deep domain expertise and conviction.
- **Long-term, low-turnover partnership**: No partner has ever left the firm, providing consistent mentorship and support across company lifecycles.
- **Exceptional track record**: 1 in 10 early-stage investments have gone public, and 1 in 5 have reached unicorn status.
- **High-touch approach**: Partners make only one investment per year each, enabling deep diligence and hands-on founder support.

## Strategic Focus
- **Leading the AI transformation**: Actively investing in AI infrastructure, physical world AI, and AI-Native Services (AINS) as the next wave of enterprise business models.
- **Staying early and focused**: Maintaining a disciplined, thesis-driven investment strategy while scaling support for portfolio companies.
- **Expanding talent and resources**: Growing the internal team to sustain high-touch partnership and adding new capabilities (e.g., dedicated operating partners).

## Why Work Here
- **Culture of collaboration and long-term thinking**: The firm values “unanimous enthusiasm” on investments and emphasizes integrity, humility, and fairness.
- **Low turnover & internal growth**: Team members are developed into partner roles from within; no GP ever departs.
- **Impact on iconic companies**: Employees contribute to shaping the future of enterprise cloud alongside firms like Zoom, Salesforce, Veeva, and Gusto.
- **Work location**: Likely hybrid/office in San Francisco (not explicitly confirmed). [emcap.com/careers](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/emergence-capital-partners)

## Sources
1. [Emergence Capital Website](https://www.emcap.com/)
2. [About Emergence Capital](https://www.emcap.com/about)
3. [Team Page](https://www.emcap.com/team)
4. [Hiring For Our Values Blog Post](https://www.emcap.com/thoughts/hiring-for-our-values)
5. [Emergence Capital Job Board](https://talent.emcap.com/jobs)

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