Lead Product Designer

You will define how millions of people experience a new category of software.

Onix is building Personal Intelligence: AI that runs on your device, belongs to you, and makes you sharper over time without extraction, surveillance, or manipulation. This is a consumer product with real stakes. It requires world-class taste, ruthless simplicity, and the ability to design systems that people return to because they want to, not because they’re trapped.

We’re not hiring a designer to make screens. We’re hiring the person who will architect the experience, own the design system, and shape the product philosophy. You’ll report directly to the founders and sit at the product table as a peer, not a service function.

If you’ve built high-scale consumer products at Instagram, Snap, Duolingo, Roblox, Pinterest, Epic, or similar and you want to define a category instead of iterating on someone else’s, keep reading.

What You’ll Own

Everything.

Interaction model for Personal Intelligence across mobile and web
Design system, motion language, and visual identity
Onboarding, progression, retention, and behavioral loops
UX surfaces that make complex AI and privacy constraints feel simple and human
Product strategy alongside founders (not downstream of it)
Design culture that future hires will inherit

This is a zero-to-one role. You’ll ship daily in Figma with engineering. You’ll make tradeoffs in real-time. You’ll define patterns that don’t exist yet.

What You’ve Done

Led design on a consumer product with 1M+ DAU (not “contributed to”, led)
Built or owned a design system in production that engineers actually use
Designed experiences with progression, identity, or habit formation (not badges, behavior)
Shipped on mobile with real constraints: latency, privacy, trust, offline
Worked in fast cycles with engineering (weekly releases, not quarterly)
Thought like a PM while shipping like a designer

What You Understand Instinctively

Behavior design: motivation, ritual, identity, progression
Consumer psychology without dark patterns or addiction hacks
How to create “holy shit” moments while keeping the product minimal
How to make privacy feel like power, not friction
How to turn complex AI into simple, human interfaces
How to build trust through restraint

Who You Are

Velocity-first, taste-driven, execution-obsessed
Confident enough to challenge founders, humble enough to ship v1 and learn
Sharp instincts, calm ego, high ownership
Comfortable with ambiguity, complexity, and inventing from zero
Able to think like Instagram, design like Apple, and experiment like Duolingo

This Role is NOT For You If:

You need a large design team to feel supported
You prefer process and alignment over speed and judgment
You see “design system” as a Figma library, not a product philosophy
You want to hand off specs and move on
You’re optimizing for title, not impact
You’re not willing to be in-person in Montreal

What Success Looks Like

Onix feels inevitable: fast, simple, sovereign, deeply human
A design system that engineers love and future designers respect
Progression and behavioral loops that empower users, not extract from them
A product identity so coherent that competitors can’t copy it without copying the philosophy
Users describing Onix as “beautiful, calm, trustworthy, and hard to put down for the right reasons”

Why Montreal

We’re building Onix in Old Montreal because the best products come from teams that are physically together, debating, sketching, shipping, and eating lunch. Montreal has elite AI and design talent, a thriving creative scene, and a cost of living that lets you have a life outside of work.

If you’re already here, great.

If you’re in SF, NYC, LA, or Seattle and you’re tired of paying $4,000/month for a one-bedroom while your equity gets diluted into nothing, we’ll bring you here.

How to Apply

Email hello@onixai.ai with:

Your portfolio (required), case studies or shipped work, not just visuals
Figma links (strongly preferred), show us how you think, not just what you output
One product you shaped at scale: the problem, your approach, the tradeoffs, and what you’d do differently (video, Loom, or written, your call)