build-ai

Head of Design & Taste

San Francisco
Full-time
$150K - $250K
Posted Aug 30, 2026

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Skills

Figma
Recruiting

Job description

ABOUT BUILD AI

Build AI is the data hyperscaler for Physical AI. We're vertically integrated across hardware, manufacturing, logistics, collection, and model training to scale the physical labor dataset orders of magnitude faster than anyone in the world.

JOB SUMMARY

We’re hiring someone whose job is to make everything beautiful: product, site, job board, internal tools, merch, and the way we show up in the world. Taste is the requirement. You will set what Build looks and feels like, then actually make it — including merch and physical stuff, not only Figma.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

•Own visual taste across product, brand, and anything a human sees

•Treat the website, job board, and recruiting surfaces as products you ship, not a vendor deck

•Make interfaces, artifacts, and merch that look like a company people want to join and buy from

•Design merch and physical objects (and work with Shenzhen ID/ME on collection hardware CMF when taste is on the line)

•Work with Product Lead and software so tools aren’t ugly by default

•Keep a high bar when we move fast so “shipping” doesn’t mean looking cheap

YOU MAY BE A GOOD FIT IF YOU HAVE (MUST-HAVE QUALIFICATIONS)

•Taste is obvious in your work. Portfolio over credentials

•You’ve shipped both digital and physical/brand (merch, packaging, environments a plus)

•Enough design fluency (Figma or similar) to ship interfaces and layouts yourself

•You can operate as the design function, not manage a 20-person org

STRONG CANDIDATES MAY ALSO HAVE EXPERIENCE WITH (NICE-TO-HAVE QUALIFICATIONS)

•Merch, packaging, or physical environments, not only product UI

•You have been the only designer in a company and still shipped

•Familiarity with factory, CMF, or hardware-adjacent objects

•Experience owning a website or brand system end to end

BENEFITS

•Competitive pay

•Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage

•$500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits

•Housing subsidy of $2k per month for those living within walking distance of the office

•Relocation support for those moving to San Francisco (Financial District) or Shenzhen (Nanshan)

•Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more

•Daily lunch and dinner in our office

•Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification

•Unlimited Codex and Claude credits

•Travel

HOW WE'RE DIFFERENT

Build believes in the Bitter Lesson http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html. By taking a general approach of learning from humans, our addressable market is all physical labor.

We are a fully in-person team in San Francisco (Financial District) and Shenzhen (Nanshan), and greatly value engineering skills. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both and work across disciplines as needed.

Build AI is an equal opportunity employer. We review every application. If you do not meet every bullet, still apply. Questions: research@build.ai