About The Role

We're looking for a Lead Product Designer to join our design team and own major parts of the product end to end.

This is a seat for someone with the craft, taste, perspective, and judgment of a design leader as well as the instincts of a great teammate. You'll set direction for the surfaces you own rather than wait for a spec, and you'll raise the bar for everyone around you. You influence what to build, design it, and see it shipped.

Why this role is different

We're hiring a Lead Product Designer to own major parts of the product end to end. This is a seat for someone with the craft, perspective, and judgment of a design leader. You'll set direction for the surfaces you own rather than wait for a spec. You influence what to build, design it, and see it shipped.

You should be meticulous about building simple flows out of incredibly complex processes: how one step connects to the next, what state the user is in at every point, where they get stuck, and what happens at each branch, handoff, and edge case. And you should be relentless about the user's voice: what a grieving family actually feels, where the process confuses or saddens them, and what they need to see in the hardest moments.

This role works closely with Product, Engineering, and Growth. As we scale, it can grow into Head of Design.

What you'll own

As Elayne's Lead Product Designer, you will turn complex, emotionally loaded problems into product experiences families can trust.

1. End-to-end flows for the surfaces you own

You will design complete journeys, not screens in isolation: the entry point, every branch and state, the error and edge cases, the empty states, and the handoffs to AI or human support. You own how it feels start to finish.

2. Trust around legal and financial complexity

You will design how Elayne explains money, legal authority, and institutional process to people who are overwhelmed. You will decide what to surface, what to simplify, and how to make unfamiliar, high-stakes concepts feel safe and clear.

3. The role of AI in the experience

You will define where AI should lead the user, where it should work quietly in the background, and where a human needs to be present. You will design the patterns that make automated help feel trustworthy rather than uncanny.

4. The system that lets quality scale

Over time, you will build and steward the design language, components, and patterns that let Elayne grow without losing craft or consistency. You will raise the bar for how the whole team designs.

What we're looking for

5 or more years designing and shipping product end to end, ideally for consumer or complex product surfaces where the experience, not just the interface, was your responsibility.
Mastery of interaction and systems design. You think in flows, states, and edge cases, and you obsess over the connective tissue between screens, not just the screens themselves.
Strong product judgment. You can set direction without a spec, understand priorities make the call on what to build and why, and defend it with reasoning rooted in the user, not in trends.
A track record of working from the user's actual voice, translating real behavior and real confusion into design decisions rather than designing for an imagined ideal user.
At least one experience at a Seed-stage or Series A company, where systems are still being built, priorities shift quickly, and speed matters more than perfection.

How we work

We are a small, high-trust team. We care deeply about the people we serve, but we are not precious about process. We move very quickly, communicate directly, and hold a high bar for the quality of the experience we deliver.

The work here is highly collaborative. The best ideas often come from being close to the details: a family conversation, a product gap, an operational edge case, or a partner need. We expect people to take ownership of outcomes, pull in the right teammates, and turn what they learn into better systems for everyone.

Location and expectations

This is a full-time role based with the rest of the team in New York City.

This is not a passive 9-to-5 role. We are not looking for performative intensity, but want to be upfront that there will be moments when families, partners, or internal priorities require responsiveness outside typical working hours. The right person is energized by meaningful, high-ownership work and is willing to do what it takes with judgment and care.

Elayne offers health insurance and a 401(k).

Equal opportunity

Elayne is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants based on ability, experience, and potential, and do not discriminate on the basis of any protected characteristic under applicable federal, state, or local laws.

Each year, $3 trillion in wealth is transferred to the next generation. Yet the process behind that handoff is broken: faxes, phone trees, spreadsheets, and grief. It can take families hundreds of hours, tens of thousands of dollars in fees, and often years to complete.

Elayne is building the software layer this process has always been missing. We're both the infrastructure that professionals leverage and the product families use directly, automating everything from the first form to the final account transfer.

Backed by Y Combinator and Accel, we have thousands of families already using Elayne to get through one of the hardest stretches of their lives. We have a real product in people's hands, a brand and design language we care deeply about, and a long road of hard, genuinely impactful problems ahead.

Elayne

Lead Product Designer

About the role