--- title: 'Product Designer at Tavus' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/product-designer-tavus-san-francisco-813z9bn38tfr' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-10' --- # Product Designer at Tavus - **Company:** Tavus - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-07-09 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tavus/45fdebdf-c3e1-480f-bbfb-ab4deee35db7 ## Job description ## About Us [Tavus](http://tavus.io/) is an AI research lab pioneering human computing. We’re building PALs: a new kind of application that closes the gap between people and machines, free from the friction of today’s systems. Our real-time human simulation models let machines see, hear, respond, and even look real—enabling meaningful, face-to-face conversations. PALs combine the emotional intelligence of humans with the reach and reliability of machines, making them capable, trusted agents available 24/7, in every language, on our terms. Imagine a therapist anyone can afford. A personal trainer that adapts to your schedule. A fleet of medical assistants that can give every patient the attention they need. With Tavus, individuals, enterprises, and developers can all build PALs to connect, understand, and act with empathy at scale. We’re a Series B company backed by world-class investors including Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator, and Scale Venture Partners. Be part of shaping a future where humans and machines truly understand each other. ## The Role We are seeking a craft-obsessed, systems-minded Product Designer to evolve our product suite and own & grow the Tavus design systems – the components, tokens, and patterns that every surface we build on top of depends on. This is a Product Design role that demands exceptional VisD skills and experience. We need someone with exceptional eye and hand for typography, color, spacing, and detail, who can bring real motion craft to how our system feels in use. But the design system doesn't exist in a vacuum: It has to hold up under real product and UX problems, across a growing portfolio of products, so strong product design judgment is a must. This role has a deliberate arc. In the near term, your focus will be the design system: consolidating, architecting, and elevating it into something stable, distinct, and built to scale with us. As that foundation matures, we expect this role to evolve into ownership of a product area, where you'll carry the same craft and judgment forward into shipping product day to day. We're looking for someone genuinely excited by both halves. You will collaborate closely with product, engineering, and leadership in a fast-paced environment to make the system the clear, trusted foundation for how we design and build. Join our small, creative team of designers, engineers, and product enthusiasts dedicated to thoughtfully bridging the human-machine divide. We're doing it right, sweating the details, and we're in it together. This role is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. ## What You'll Do - Architect for scale: Define the token architecture, component structure, and theming model (light, dark, and beyond) that let the system flex across products and surfaces without forking or drifting. - Own governance, not just files: Establish the standards, documentation, and contribution model that keep the system coherent as more designers and engineers touch it. Be the clear, decisive voice when tradeoffs get contentious. - Partner deeply with engineering: Work hand-in-hand with frontend engineers to ensure the system is implemented faithfully and effectively. - Elevate craft everywhere: Bring meticulous visual and interaction craft, including motion and micro-interaction detail, to every component and pattern so the system doesn't just function, it feels intentional and distinctly Tavus. “Good enough” isn’t. - Drive adoption: Make the system easier to use than not using it. Build the artifacts, documentation, and relationships that get other designers, engineers, and marketers to reach for the system first. ## Who You Are - An indefatigable visual designer, with an exceptional, well-trained eye for typography, color, layout, and detail, plus real motion design chops. - A genuinely capable product designer, with 6+ years of experience and solid UX judgment. You understand user flows, interaction patterns, and product tradeoffs well enough that your systems hold up with elegance under real product pressure. - Experienced building and governing design systems at scale. You can point to a system you've architected and evolved, not just contributed to, with bonus points for work both within an existing component framework as well as from-scratch builds. - Original, not just tasteful. We're not looking for someone who can recognize good design when they see it; we're looking for someone who can produce something distinct that hasn't been seen before. If your portfolio could pass for a dozen other SaaS products, this isn't the right fit. We'll ask you to walk us through specific decisions and the reasoning behind them, and the results those decisions yielded. - Principled and able to defend it. You’re especially adept at articulating why a decision is correct. You push back on your own instincts as readily as you push back on others'. - Decisive in ambiguity: You don't need permission to make a call. When a system decision has no clean answer, you weigh the tradeoffs, make a defensible choice, and move, while staying meticulous about the details within that decision. - Technically fluent: You're comfortable working close to code: reviewing implementation, catching and stopping drift between design and build, and speaking the language of the engineers who ship your system. - Built for startup pace: You can operate with minimal specs and shifting priorities, protecting the highest quality bar while moving fast. ## Benefits & Culture When you join Tavus, you’re joining a diverse and supportive team. Our work is driven by our people, and our success is shared by all. This position has a flexible work schedule, unlimited PTO, competitive healthcare, and gear stipends, as well as plenty of fun. At the end of the day, we want Tavus to be a place for you to learn, directly drive impact, and work with a team you love. To learn more about our team culture and benefits, check out our[hiring page.](https://www.tavus.io/careers) Tavus is growing fast, and we’d like you to grow with us. If you’re excited to get your hands dirty and help make machines more human, drop your resume and we’ll be in touch. We are not looking for cultural fits, we are looking for culture creators. Diversity is what drives our success – it’s at the core of how we hire, communicate, and work. We are inclusive to all and combine our diverse backgrounds, skill sets, and perspectives to build the best experiences for our clients. ## About Tavus ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Tavus is an AI research lab and platform pioneering "Human Computing," building models and APIs that enable AI to see, hear, understand, and respond with lifelike realism in real-time. - **Entity Type**: Private (Venture-backed) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, CA, United States - **Founded**: 2021 - **Founders**: Hassaan Raza & Quinn Favret ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Artificial Intelligence / Human Computing / Multi-modal AI - **Target customers**: B2B; Product teams and developers (via API and no-code builder), enterprise teams (for onboarding, training, support), and prosumers/individuals (for tutors, companions, assistants). - **Mission**: "To make human-AI interaction as natural as face-to-face interaction, enabling the human touch where it has been previously unscalable." [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/tavus) ## Products & Services - **Conversational Video Interface (CVI)**: An API-first platform that allows developers to embed real-time, face-to-face conversational AI into any product. It enables emotionally intelligent, adaptive interactions with sub-second latency. - **Tavus Platform (No-Code SaaS)**: A no-code builder that lets individuals and enterprises create custom AI humans for use in onboarding, training, customer engagement, or personal use by customizing personality, knowledge, and appearance. - **Replica API**: Tools for creating personal or stock digital twins (replicas) with studio-grade fidelity, full-face rendering, and identity preservation. Supports both individual and large-scale deployment. - **Personas**: A system for defining custom personalities and context to tailor the behavior of AI humans. - **Core AI Models**: - **Sparrow (Conversational Flow Model)**: Delivers low-latency, accurate turn-taking by analyzing lexical, semantic, prosodic, and acoustic cues. - **Raven (Perception Model)**: A multi-modal perception engine that translates facial expressions, tone, gaze, and emotion into conversational signals. - **Phoenix (Rendering Model)**: A gaussian-diffusion based model for high-fidelity, photorealistic facial rendering with contextually accurate emotions and expressions in real time. [tavus.io](https://www.tavus.io/) ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed. - **Key Metric**: **Total Funding**: $40M+ (including a $18M raise in 2024 and a subsequent Series B for $40M in 2025). [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/tavus), [techcrunch.com](https://techcrunch.com) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Scale Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator (Summer 2021 batch), HubSpot. [tavus.io](https://www.tavus.io/lp/ai-info-page) - **Growth Signals**: - Demonstrated product-market fit with case studies for clients like Final Round AI (1.2M practice minutes logged), ACTO (life sciences training), and CareFlick (senior companionship). - Raising significant venture capital over multiple rounds, indicating strong investor confidence and a long runway for R&D. ## Competitive Advantages - **Real-time realism**: Overcomes the "uncanny valley" with sub-second latency and photorealistic rendering, a key differentiator from asynchronous video-generation and static avatar companies. - **Comprehensive AI Human Stack**: Offers a full operating system (perception, memory, knowledge, action) rather than just a single component like an avatar. - **Flexibility**: Provides multiple integration paths—a modular API, a bring-your-own-LLM option, and a no-code builder—making it accessible to both technical and non-technical users. - **Ethical foundation**: Built with a stated commitment to privacy, consent, and empathy, and aims for transparency in disclosure (e.g., SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance). ## Strategic Focus - **Category Creation**: Actively establishing "Human Computing" as a new industry standard for human-AI interaction, moving beyond simple chatbots and scripted avatars. - **Developer Ecosystem**: Centered on an API-first strategy to become the platform of choice for developers building the next generation of AI assistants, companions, and employees. - **Real-time & Multi-modal**: Continuing to push the boundaries of multi-modal AI (video, audio, text, emotion) to create more intuitive and authentic interactions. - **Enterprise & Prosumer Scale**: Growing the no-code platform to serve both enterprise-scale training/support and personal use cases (tutoring, wellness, companionship). ## Why Work Here - **Cutting-edge Research & Impact**: A chance to work on frontier multi-modal AI models (perception, rendering, conversation) that directly shape how humans interact with machines. - **Culture**: Described as a tight-knit, high-output team with semi-annual full-team retreats and a focus on continuous learning alongside AI leaders. [tavus.io](https://www.tavus.io/careers) - **Compensation & Benefits**: Offers competitive salary, meaningful equity, fully covered medical, dental, and vision for employees and their families, unlimited PTO, and a gear stipend for setting up the workspace. [tavus.io](https://www.tavus.io/careers) - **Work Environment**: "Our team moves mountains to bring the vision to life, and we’ve got their backs." The company appears to embrace a hybrid/office culture in San Francisco (SOMA) with remote options for some roles (e.g., Senior Software Engineer). [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/tavus) - **Team Growth**: Team size reported as around 40 members. Currently hiring for roles like AI Researcher (Perception), Customer Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, and Solution Engineer. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/tavus), [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tavus) ## Sources 1. [tavus.io](https://www.tavus.io/) 2. [tavus.io/careers](https://www.tavus.io/careers) 3. [tavus.io/lp/ai-info-page](https://www.tavus.io/lp/ai-info-page) 4. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/tavus) 5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tavus) 6. [techcrunch.com](https://techcrunch.com) ## Other roles at Tavus - [Senior Software Engineer (CVI)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-cvi-tavus-san-francisco-0xy8c3dnhxe0) — San Francisco, CA - [Vibe Growth Marketer](https://feeny.ai/job/vibe-growth-marketer-tavus-san-francisco-ynha49h58qg6) — San Francisco, CA - [Business Development Representative](https://feeny.ai/job/business-development-representative-tavus-san-francisco-vaebfha9r4ex) — San Francisco, CA - [Brand & Product Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/brand-product-designer-tavus-san-francisco-8ph3kwhaykea) — San Francisco, CA - [Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/product-manager-tavus-san-francisco-w8gfpeca4wqe) — San Francisco, CA - [Enterprise Account Executive](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-tavus-san-francisco-eh3s3n051tk8) — San Francisco, CA - [AI Researcher (Multimodal Audio/Video Generation)](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-researcher-multimodal-audio-video-generation-tavus-san-francisco-rebzx76z9c96) — San Francisco, CA - [Marketer (Brand, Product, Storytelling)](https://feeny.ai/job/marketer-brand-product-storytelling-tavus-san-francisco-3avcsehy2hny) — San Francisco, CA - [Conversational Modelling Research Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/conversational-modelling-research-engineer-tavus-remote-rhfhte0fhg6v) - [Software Engineer, Infrastructure](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-infrastructure-tavus-2294fqzd0wmy)