---
title: 'Product Designer at Outset'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/product-designer-outset-san-francisco-nbwfk5v51ytb'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-26'
---

# Product Designer at Outset

- **Company:** Outset
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $180k–$220k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-23
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-26
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/outset/1471f59b-a542-4e59-a215-e038c29f12aa

## Job description

Outset invented a better way to do research: AI-powered user interviews.

Global brands like Hubspot, Microsoft, Uber and Nestle use Outset to achieve deeper, qualitative insights about their users at unprecedented speed and scale.

The research industry is massive (>$140B and growing) and ripe for disruption. Incumbents are outdated, slow, and burdened by high-cost services. That's our opportunity.

Outset is backed by top Silicon Valley investors and raised a $30M Series B in December 2025—less than six months after our Series A—led by Radical Ventures with participation from M12 (Microsoft’s venture arm), 8VC, Y Combinator, and Adverb Ventures.

The raise follows a breakout year, with our business growing 8x as enterprise customers across industries adopt our category, AI‑moderated research, as the new standard for understanding people.

We’re a tight-knit team serving some of the world’s largest enterprises.

We're looking for an experienced product designer to join our small team and own meaningful parts of the Outset product. A significant part of your purview will be our Digital Twins / Simulations Lab—a new 0→1 product we're building alongside the core platform—though the work will reach across the product as the team's needs evolve. Simulations are deep tech. Underneath the product are models, data pipelines, and research methods built by our scientists, and presenting a complex product with simplicity and intuitiveness is critical. You'll need to be curious about what's happening under the hood, patient enough to understand it, and sharp enough to translate it into product experiences that a researcher can grasp quickly. You'll work closely with our Head of Design, PMs, Sales, and Engineering to understand what we're building and how we're selling it, and to make sure the product reflects both. Newer parts of the product, Simulations especially, are being actively shaped by customer feedback and competitive dynamics. We're looking for someone who holds a high bar for craft without being precious about their own work as we iterate. So much has changed about what it means to do "design work." The toolkit has expanded to include tools like Codex and Claude Design, and our team spends as much time generating and molding prototypes as organizing canvases in Figma. Technical fluency is a major plus here, but strong opinions, taste, and a track record of shipping are what matter most. You'll join a small design team and own projects from the kernel of an idea to a feature customers use every day, working directly with our founders and, on simulations work, the scientists building the lab.

## Responsibilities

- Own product surfaces end to end. Take projects from early concepts through launch and iteration, including a central role in our Simulations work.
- Simplify technical complexity. Dig into how our simulations and other systems actually work, then design experiences that make the output legible and trustworthy to researchers.
- Stay close to customers. Sit in on customer conversations, read the feedback, and turn it into design decisions quickly.
- Hold a high bar for craft. Produce wireframes, interaction designs and high-fidelity visuals, and sweat the details in the shipped product.
- Know what not to build. Question features that add complexity without adding much value, and help the team cut scope down to what matters most.

## Qualifications

- We don't have many explicit requirements, and exceptional candidates might bend these rules.
- 5+ years of product design industry experience, ideally including time as the lead or founding designer on a product or major product area.
- Experience taking a product from 0 to 1, or working in an early-stage environment where the direction changed often.
- Genuine curiosity about technically complex systems, and a track record of designing clear products on top of them.
- Comfort working directly with customers and treating their feedback as a primary input to design.
- Exceptional communication skills.
- Strong but loosely held opinions on design and product.

## Preferred Qualifications

- Comfort designing in code—building prototypes with real data, or shipping frontend changes alongside engineers.
- Experience building enterprise software.
- Experience building in the research industry.

## About Outset

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Outset is an AI-moderated research platform that combines conversational AI, behavioral intelligence, and emotional analysis to let companies run high-quality qualitative interviews and research studies at massive scale.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Aaron Cannon (CEO) and Michael Hess

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Software Development / AI-Moderated Research & Insights Platform
- **Target customers**: Enterprise research teams (UX/Market/Consumer Insights), large corporations, and product teams (B2B, Enterprise)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "The future of innovation begins with listening to humans." Understanding people’s needs, motivations, and behaviors is the hardest and most important challenge for businesses; Outset makes that understanding effortless and scalable.

## Products & Services
- **AI-Moderated Interviews**: Conduct hundreds of AI-moderated interviews simultaneously in any language (video, voice, or text). The AI moderator dynamically probes participants based on audio and visual cues to uncover the "why" behind answers.
- **Instant Synthesis & Analysis**: Automatically generates highly relevant summaries, themes, impactful quotes, and customizable highlight reels based on research objectives, eliminating manual tagging and sifting.
- **Participant Recruitment**: Recruit hundreds of participants directly within the platform, or share an interview link with any external list.
- **Guide Set Up**: Effortlessly set up interview guides using AI, with qualitative/quantitative questions, advanced probing guidelines, and intelligent skipping logic.
- **Easy Stakeholder Shareout**: Get instant top-line reports, custom AI-generated reports, highlight reels, and ready-to-share PowerPoint decks to integrate research into decision-making.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Annual Revenue of USD 8,500,000 (as of latest data). Total Funding of USD 51,250,000.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Lead investors include **Radical Ventures** (Series B), **8VC** (Series A), with participation from 24 investors in earlier rounds. Trusted by enterprises like **Microsoft**, **Nestle**, **Uber**, **Hubspot**, and **Away**.
- **Growth Signals**: Massive headcount growth of **+563.6% year-over-year** (now 54 employees). Customer research coverage from 1.1B+ possible participants across 85+ countries, with over 500K studies run on the platform.

## Competitive Advantages
- Proprietary AI that bridges the "say-do gap" by probing in real-time based on audio and visual cues, not just recall.
- Multi-modal, multi-lingual scaling: enables research in any language, at any timezone, with continuous, multithreaded AI-moderated conversations.
- Enterprise-grade simplicity: designed for large research teams, removing scheduling friction and operations overhead so research happens in days, not months.
- End-to-end platform: from participant recruitment, guide setup, AI-moderation, to instant analysis and stakeholder shareout — a single integrated suite.

## Strategic Focus
- Expand leadership in replacing traditional, slow qualitative research (surveys, live interviews) with instant, scalable AI-moderated studies.
- Deepen enterprise penetration with top-tier clients (Microsoft, Nestle, Uber, HubSpot) by continuing to add advanced behavioral and emotional analysis features.
- Scale the platform’s capabilities to cover the entire research lifecycle more comprehensively, continuing to invest heavily in R&D.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture highlights**: "Supportive founders and seasoned investors foster community, without startup toxicity." Team is described as "smart, kind, and driven teammates who know how to make work fun." Founders are very hands-on and accessible.
- **Remote/hybrid/office policy**: Primarily in-office at a "million-dollar office space" in SF with sweeping views and quick access to Market Street.
- **Notable perks**: Daily catered lunches and snacks with flexible dietary options, unlimited PTO, comprehensive health insurance (medical/dental/vision), unlimited budget for productivity tools, commuter benefits, allowance for continuing education, 401k with 6% match.
- **Engineering culture**: A strong technical focus (backend and frontend engineers) working on state-of-the-art AI and NLP. 9 active job postings across sales, engineering, marketing, design, and operations.
- **Who should apply**: People passionate about AI, user research, and building products that make human understanding scalable. The company values balance, growth, and high-impact work without "startup toxicity."

## Sources
1. [outset.ai](https://outset.ai/)
2. [outset.ai/careers](https://outset.ai/careers)
3. [linkedin.com/company/outset-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/outset-ai)
4. [ycombinator.com/companies/outset](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/outset)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/outset](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/outset)

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