---
title: 'Lead Designer at Foundation'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/lead-designer-foundation-san-francisco-9pd1sh3brmts'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Lead Designer at Foundation

- **Company:** Foundation
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-02-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/foundation/8b4df7e0-6f71-4815-a42c-3301c6936b45

## Job description

## INTRODUCTION

Foundation https://buildwithfoundation.com/ is hiring a lead designer to accelerate our core business, modernize homebuilding, and transform the experience of buying, selling, and owning homes.

## ABOUT FOUNDATION

Backed by $6.8M in funding from leading VCs (including Y Combinator), Foundation is an ex-Opendoor team transforming residential real estate.

Foundation’s first product is the native customer experience platform for homebuilders — think “Shopify for Homebuilders.” We work with enterprise-scale homebuilders to deliver a modern digital customer experience, dramatically improving both their customer happiness and the productivity of their teams. In two years, we’ve demonstrated clear product-market fit and rapid growth — all with just contract design support.

We’re still in the first of three overlapping phases of growth and company-building:

1. Transformative, AI-driven vertical SaaS for homebuilding — a public-scale opportunity in its own right.
2. The enterprise ecosystem for real estate. Homebuilders are the economic engine that starts this flywheel, unlocking an order-of-magnitude larger opportunity. This ecosystem fosters collaboration between (and network effects with) adjacent trillion-dollar industries — lending, title, home insurance, home services, retail, and more.
3. The AI-native home operating system and interface. The economic engine of vertical SaaS and the network effects of the enterprise ecosystem fund and fuel the flywheel that enables us to (profitably) deliver the transformative consumer AI experience for homebuyers and homeowners. Find, buy, and operate your home — all with Foundation.

## FOUNDATION’S FIRST DESIGN LEAD

We’re hiring our first hands-on design leader to work directly with our founders, customers, and engineers. We’re looking for a full-stack, impact-obsessed, AI-accelerated designer who wants to transform a major pillar of the U.S. economy and help redefine design for the AI era.

## THE JOB

You’ll play a central role in driving Foundation’s next stages of growth — working at the intersection of design, AI, and real estate transformation.

Here’s a taste of potential priorities:

- Elevate and accelerate our core products: both consumer (homebuyer + homeowner) and homebuilder experiences
- Deliver our first AI-native workflow products to transform back-office productivity in one of the biggest industries in the U.S.
- Collaborate with marketing and sales to communicate our brand and value to every U.S. builder in the U.S.
- Research, discover, design and launch our next major product lines: a new AI-native home shopping and sales experience, and a collaboration platform to streamline and enrich the home buying process for buyers, builders, lenders (mortgage), and title companies.

Throughout, you’ll play a hands-on role in shaping our products, roadmap, marketing, and vision.

## THE REQUIREMENTS

- You have 7-10+ years of experience as a designer at high-growth, venture-backed technology companies.
- You are a full-stack designer — from research through exploration, product launches, and continuous improvement. Bonus points if you obsess about everything from product strategy and feature-level pixels to the fine details of marketing campaigns.
- You’re highly collaborative, and do your best work by engaging deeply with cross-functional groups of customers, engineers, PMs, and operators
- You love getting to know new customers and new markets.

## About Foundation

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Foundation provides a white-labeled, native mobile and web customer experience platform for homebuilders to manage the entire buyer journey from sales and closing through to warranty and ownership.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Pre-Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Derek Schairer and Luke Groesbeck

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Real Estate Technology (PropTech), Vertical SaaS for Homebuilding
- **Target customers**: B2B – Enterprise and regional homebuilders (e.g., Legend Homes, Betenbough Homes, Trumark Homes)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "Deliver world-class technology to help homebuilders sell more homes, more profitably, to happier customers."

## Products & Services
- **Foundation Buyer Apps**: Native, white-labeled mobile apps and an integrated customer portal for homebuyers to track progress, access documents, submit warranty requests, and message their builder team.
- **Operator & Automation**: A control center for sales, closing, and operations teams to manage every buyer and milestone, streamline communication, coordinate handoffs, and automate routine tasks.
- **WarrantyOS**: An integrated system for managing warranty requests, providing automation and insights into buyer and owner interactions.
- **Integrations**: Connects to key back-office systems used by homebuilders.
- **Insights**: Provides actionable data on buyer engagement.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (Private company)
- **Key Metric**: $6.8M in total funding (Pre-Seed round)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (Summer 2023 batch, primary partner Garry Tan), along with 4 other unnamed pre-seed investors. Partners include homebuilders like Legend Homes, Betenbough Homes, and Trumark Homes.
- **Growth Signals**: The company has demonstrated rapid early growth, showing clear product-market fit within two years. Headcount grew 133.3% year-over-year to 11 employees. The company is actively hiring for senior engineering roles to accelerate its core business.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Deep Industry Expertise**: Founders have 15+ years of combined experience in homebuilding (Lennar) and real estate technology (Opendoor). This gives them unique insight into the pain points of the industry.
- **"Shopify for Homebuilders" Model**: By providing a white-labeled, modern digital experience, Foundation allows traditional builders to offer a tech-forward customer journey without building the software themselves. This is a key differentiator in a largely offline industry.
- **Early Enterprise Traction**: The company has already secured partnerships with leading national and regional builders, validating its enterprise-grade platform.
- **Long-Term Vision**: Foundation is not just a SaaS tool; it's building a platform with the potential to become an "AI-native home operating system" and a central ecosystem for adjacent industries like lending, title, and insurance.

## Strategic Focus
- **Phase 1: Core Platform Growth**: Accelerating the adoption of its customer experience platform with enterprise-scale homebuilders.
- **AI Integration**: Pragmatically integrating AI into workflows to transform traditional "forms and friction" into guided, intelligent experiences for both builders and buyers.
- **Building the Team**: Aggressively hiring senior engineers to move from contract design support to a full-fledged product and engineering team.
- **Ecosystem Development**: Laying the groundwork for a larger enterprise ecosystem that connects homebuilders with lending, title, home insurance, and home services.

## Why Work Here
- **High Impact, Early Stage**: As an early employee, you will own meaningful problems end-to-end, from discovery to production, with a direct impact on the product and the company's trajectory.
- **Mission-Driven**: The work directly modernizes a massive, traditional industry, improving the experience for both homebuilders and millions of homebuyers.
- **Engineering Culture**: The company seeks "builders" who are product-minded, pragmatic about AI, and value clean, composable systems. The culture emphasizes quality, reliability, and a bias toward action.
- **Work Policy**: The company has a hybrid workspace with offices in San Francisco and Austin. Some roles, like the Lead Designer, are listed as hybrid. The company is described as having an "in-office" culture with a typical time on-site expectation.
- **Backed by Top Investors**: Being a Y Combinator company with backing from leading VCs provides stability and a strong network.

## Sources
1. [buildwithfoundation.com](https://buildwithfoundation.com/)
2. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/foundation-1)
3. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/foundation-2)
4. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/foundation-tech)
5. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/job/software-engineering/9216046)

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