Partner 20

Partner 20, Senior Product Designer

Founded in Silicon Valley in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz (known as "a16z") is a venture capital firm that backs bold entrepreneurs building the future through technology. We are stage agnostic: We invest in seed to venture to late-stage technology companies, across bio + healthcare, consumer, crypto, enterprise, fintech, games, and companies building toward American dynamism. a16z has $35B in assets under management across multiple funds.

We’ve established a team that is defined by respect for the entrepreneur and the company-building process; we know what it’s like to be in the founder’s shoes. We’ve invested in companies like Affirm, Airbnb, Coinbase, Databricks, Devoted Health, Insitro, Figma, GitHub, Instacart, OpenSea, Roblox, Stripe, and Substack. Our team is at the forefront of new technology, helping founders and their companies impact and change the world.

Applied Software at a16z

We believe the future is built founder-first, and we ship novel products and experiences to enable that future. Applied software at a16z means building systems that help find and connect the entrepreneurs, investors, executives, engineers, academics, industry experts, and others in the technology ecosystem that build the world’s most enduring technology companies. We leverage state of the art language and multi-modal models, web-scale datasets, and the power of development speed to build software that helps evaluate and win the investments opportunities that generate industry-leading returns for our Investors and help our legendary founders build the future.

The Role

In this role, you will architect & design elegant software tools and experiences that drive investment opportunity discovery and evaluation. You’ll also design network building, process management, and often AI-powered products that support this overarching mission. You’ll work on multiple surfaces for multiple user personas across our organization, as well as our founders. You should be an experienced, detail-oriented, and product-focused software designer with an obsession for simple, beautiful and frictionless product interfaces and flows.

As an early team member of our design team, you will be working in a startup-like environment with high autonomy, responsibility, and speed of iteration. You will have a significant impact on not only our software, but the culture of design & technology at the firm itself. You will also represent our team’s work across the organization, and be responsible for driving white-glove user research, engagement, and marketing.

This is a high-consequence, fast-moving role that requires a clear design vision, the drive to implement that vision, the ability to ship very quickly in an organization that moves at the pace world-class engineers can ship at, exacting communication skills, and the ability to educate our team and firm on the impact of design choices we make.

If you are passionate about designing technology that creates a meaningful shift in how relationships are built, capital is allocated, and enduring technology companies are built, this is the role for you.

To join our team, you should be excited to:

• Build, move fast & learn. We ship new and unique technology quickly and often.
• Design products that are highly use-case and user specific.
• Leverage an existing product design framework to design rapidly on day one, but to bring the conviction of your own design language to bear on our products.
• Design in the 0-1 phase of the product development lifecycle.
• Design in the 1-10 iterative phase of the product development lifecycle.
• Design elegant core product features from start to finish; from conception and research to implementation and iteration, all the way through deployment, maintenance, and future iterations.
• Communicate holistically & systematically about how our user experience will and do achieve desired quantitative and narrative goals.
• Bring positive energy in every interaction with the team and drive constant collaboration.
• Create some of the most impactful products & technology of your life, and in the investment and technology industry at large.

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years in design, in mid-level Individual Contributor roles, building elegant, narrative, and consequential experiences for extremely high-IQ users. Strong candidates are likely to have experience in enterprise software that drives high-consequence decision making, or other environments with psychological & analytical rigor.
• A Bachelors in Computer Science, Product Design, Psychology or related discipline.
• Proven experience in rapid shipping & consistent excellence in process, ideally in a successful early-stage startup or as a mid-level Individual Contributor in a later stage company.
• Extensive experience shipping detailed, information-dense, enterprise product experiences. Additional experience building beautiful consumer product experiences is a major plus.
• Willingness to design across many surfaces simultaneously.
• High EQ: Strong customer empathy; you think critically of how our features impact our users, firm, investors, and community.
• High IQ: Able to autonomously create novel approaches to complex, unsolved problems and communicate them effectively to non-technical audiences.
• Working knowledge of the latest web technologies and large-scale web application & front-end architectures.
• An open, collaborative, I-win-when-the-team-wins approach to problem-solving
• Proven excellence and active listening to refine roadmaps, requirements & designs.
• Ability to operate under ambiguous and fast-moving problem spaces, often cross-functionally.

The anticipated salary range for this role is between $350,000-$408,000, actual starting pay may vary based on a range of factors which can include experience, skills, and scope.

This role is eligible to participate in the a16z carry program and various discretionary bonus programs as well as benefit and perquisite plans including health, dental, vision, disability, life insurance, 401K plan, vacation, and sick leave.