Founding Designer

About the Job

As a key growth accelerator, A11 partners with Europe’s most ambitious startups and scaleups, corporates and SMBs to connect them with top-tier talent ready to make an impact. 

We're looking for an experienced Founding Designer (m/f/d) to join and build the product experience and design language at one of our Ecosystem companies.

As a Founding Designer, you'll be the first dedicated designer and own the product experience end to end: from customer conversations and hypotheses to shipped, measured UI. You'll run product experiments in tight loops with engineering and the founders, and make sure every pixel is grounded in real customer input. Secondly, you'll shape how the company looks everywhere else, across website, brand, and decks. We're building the operating system for public procurement in a market full of grey, dated, government-style software; your job is to make the product the obvious exception: sharp, modern, and trustworthy.

Join the A11 Ecosystem – a next-generation procurement platform redefining how businesses discover, evaluate, and win public tenders across one of the world's largest yet most fragmented markets: €2 trillion in annual contract volume, scattered across 4,500+ portals in 29 countries. It harnesses qualified AI matching and agentic workflow automation to surface only the tenders that fit, analyze 100+ page documents in 30 seconds, and draft winning bids in minutes. Backed by leading investors, the company is scaling fast toward becoming the category-defining player in European public procurement.

In this role, you’ll:

• Own product design for our core products: flows, UI, and interaction, from first concept to shipped feature
• Run product experiments: talk to users, form hypotheses, prototype, ship, measure, iterate
• Do continuous discovery with customers and turn insight into design decisions
• Build and maintain our design system in the product
• Secondly, own website, brand, decks, and marketing visuals when needed

Your Profile: 

• A strong product design portfolio (B2B/SaaS a plus) with a clear eye for UI and interaction
• Experience with UX research and product discovery: interviews, prototyping, testing
• Fluent in Figma and a fast, structured way of working
• A taste level that's clearly above default: you notice the details most people miss
• Comfortable working AI-native and moving quickly with modern tools
• Strong German and English
• Bonus: range across brand, web, and presentation design
• Bonus: motion/video skills (After Effects, Premiere, CapCut, or similar)

Please note that this position is based in Hamburg. 

Benefits and Perks:

• The founding design role with full ownership over the product experience and design language
• Shape the company story alongside the founders
• AI-native stack; you'll work with the best tools from day one
• A front-row seat to building a company in a massive, untouched market

If you’re eager to join the A11 Ecosystem and shape what’s next, we want to hear from you!

Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

A11 is committed to diverse and equal opportunities hiring for all – applicants, candidates, and employees alike. We value humans – with all our glorious multifaceted backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences – and look forward to your application.