Staff Product Designer

San Francisco HQSenior$230,000 - $300,0008+ years

The problem

Hospitals still run their most important operations — staffing, labor planning, and capacity — on paper, spreadsheets, and guesswork. It's a system that wastes thousands of hours and millions of dollars every year.

Vitalize replaces this with intelligent, automated staffing operations. Our platform brings real-time decision support to clinical leaders, eliminating manual work, reducing unnecessary labor spend, and unlocking patient capacity for hospitals. AI is increasingly carrying weight inside the product — recommendations, automation, audit trails — which raises the design ceiling and the design risk in equal measure.

We're already live across 20+ hospitals, near 8-figures in revenue, and have raised $34M in total funding from top investors. We’re scaling fast.

The role

You'll be the third product designer at Vitalize, joining to scale how design operates across the company. This is a leading IC role; your impact is measured by what the rest of the team builds because of the infrastructure, patterns, and examples you ship.

You'll own complex product surfaces that cross pod boundaries. Recommendation surfaces, AI-driven workflows, data-dense decision-support tools that span the central staffing office, the unit manager, and the nurse.
You'll set the standards the team adopts. Taste documents. Pattern examples. Critique norms. The way design rationale gets written, the way design and engineering resolve disagreement, the way customer evidence shapes product moves.
You'll work directly with customers. Design at Vitalize starts with real workflows. You'll visit hospitals, observe how nurse managers and staffing offices actually work, and use that context to shape what we build.
You'll shape how the design team grows. Hiring loops, critique culture, onboarding patterns, and design operating principles. You’ll contribute input on who joins the team, how quality is maintained, and how design partners with product and engineering as we scale.
You'll set the pace for how Vitalize uses design systems: Components, tokens, patterns, contribution model, documentation, the relationship between Figma and the Tailwind codebase. Engineers are shipping correctly on their own, designers are shipping faster, and the average craft level of the product rising because of work you did.

Who you are

You have 8+ years of product design experience, ideally on complex, workflow-heavy B2B SaaS products. You've shipped real features to real users and can talk about the business impact of your work.
You've owned a design system or comparable infrastructure that other people built on top of. You've designed the contribution model, not just the components. You can talk about the tradeoffs you made.
You’re comfortable spending time in the field. You enjoy observing operational workflows firsthand and are willing to travel to customer sites regularly to understand the reality of how the product is used.
You have mature product instincts. When you see a crowded interface, your instinct is to question whether the workflow is right. You design workflow changes, not just UI improvements. The bar is whether your principle survives into the shipped product.
You're opinionated, evidence-backed, and direct. You form a point of view quickly, back it up with what you've observed in the field, and hold the line when you disagree with engineers, founders, or customers, all while building strong relationships.
You're customer-obsessed in practice, with an instinct for business outcomes. You can name the metrics your design moves were built to change and defend the bridge between the design and the metric.
You're AI-fluent. You've worked on a product surface where AI was doing real work, and you have an informed point of view on how AI should and shouldn't show its reasoning in a UI.
You're a multiplier from day one. You enjoy critique, mentoring, and infrastructure work because of what they make possible for others.

You might not be the right fit if:

You're looking to be the head of design at a Series A; this is a senior IC seat with ownership, not a management role.
You've only worked on consumer products
You need detailed specs or PRDs to start designing
Your portfolio is concept-heavy and ship-light, or you can't point to a system someone else built on

Experience in healthcare, logistics, financial operations, or similarly complex operational domains is a strong plus — the operating-model pattern in our product (expert-in-the-loop workflow automation, cost-aware recommendations, audit-trail integrity) translates directly. The domain is deep but learnable.

Why now

You'd be joining a small design team at the moment it scales from co-ownership to a real function. You'll be the third designer to join the team — the staff IC who sets the bar and the pace for delivery. You’ll multiply the output of the entire design team, leading by example, and owning critical design initiatives.

The patterns you set today — in the design system, in how we collaborate with engineering, in the quality bar we hold, in how AI shows its work to clinical staff under time pressure — will shape the product for years. You'd be working alongside founders who care about design quality and give the team real autonomy, and an engineering team that ships fast and wants to get better at building well-designed software.