Founding Product Designer

Tono Health

Tono is pioneering the future of specialty medicine, starting with dermatology. Our AI-native platform connects a national network of medical and cosmetic dermatology specialists with the patients who need them. We subspecialize in oncodermatology, Hidradenitis Suppurativa, and chronic inflammatory disease, hair restoration, and skin of color, and we're laying the foundation for space dermatology. AI-powered triage, clinical decision support, and care coordination run the full care journey. We partner with health systems, cancer centers, and primary and urgent care networks to bring subspecialty dermatology to patients where they already seek care. Headquartered in Brooklyn, NY. Live in 33 states.

We hold a high bar. Our team comes from Apple, Twitter, and Amazon. Our physicians trained and practiced at Columbia, Einstein, Harvard, Mount Sinai, Memorial Sloan Kettering and other leading medical institutions. Together we're building the company at the intersection of world-class medicine and AI-native engineering.

We're backed by leading investors including Village Global, HOF Capital, and Oncology Ventures.

Join us in our mission to deliver life-changing care to more people in more places.

Role and Description

This is a full-time role for a Founding Product Designer, our first dedicated design hire. You will work alongside our co-founders and engineering team to shape the end-to-end product experience, establish the design foundation the company builds on for years to come, and ensure every surface we ship meets a high bar for craft and usability. As our founding designer, you will own design across our clinician-facing EHR and patient-facing experiences, build and evangelize our design system from the ground up, and partner closely with engineering to bring ideas from concept to shipped product.

This is a unique opportunity to do foundational work at a company where the product design is still being defined. You'll work closely with the founders on core, high-impact issues at the intersection of medicine, business, and technology. The ideal candidate is thoughtful, detail oriented, and takes real pride in building something patients can trust. You'll have the chance to work alongside top-tier talent from Apple, Twitter, Amazon, and leading academic medical centers, and see your work reach real patients quickly.

What Success Looks Like

A year from now, both sides of the product should feel dramatically more polished and trustworthy. A patient opening Tono, often at an anxious, vulnerable moment, should feel like they're in good hands before they read a single word. A physician working inside our EHR all day should feel like they're using a tool built by people who understand their workflow, not software that was bolted together. Both should look and feel considered: clear, calm, and credible in a way that matches the quality of the medicine behind it.

That's the outcome this hire is accountable for. The design system, the component library, the documentation: all of it exists in service of that goal. It's a coherent, dependable foundation that lets a small team ship a consistently polished experience on both sides of the product without every screen being reinvented from scratch.

Where You'll Spike

We're not looking for someone who's a little bit good at everything. This role should

spike hard on systems thinking

: the ability to build and steward a design system that holds up as the product and team grow, rather than fragmenting into a patchwork of one-off screens.

Concretely, that means:

• You build the design system from the ground up: components, patterns, documentation, and the judgment calls that keep it coherent as new surfaces get added
• You can look at a new feature request and see the reusable pattern inside it, rather than designing a bespoke solution every time
• You're the person other designers (once we hire them) inherit a system from, not a Frankenstein of inconsistent parts
• You extend that systems thinking across both sides of the product, so the clinician tools and the patient experience each feel trustworthy end to end

Secondary to that: you should be comfortable using AI-assisted tools like Cursor or v0 to prototype ideas with real fidelity, so the team can test against something working rather than a static comp. This isn't the core of the role, but it's how the best people in this function are working right now.

What We're Looking For

Rather than a checklist of years, here's what the work actually requires:

• You've built or meaningfully scaled a design system before, and can speak concretely to the tradeoffs you made and why
• You can point to shipped product (clinician-facing, patient-facing, or both) where your design work visibly moved trust or perceived quality, not just usability metrics
• You can walk through a portfolio piece and explain the reasoning behind a decision, not just the aesthetic outcome
• You've worked directly with engineers to get systems implemented faithfully, not just handed off
• Nice to have: experience designing in healthcare or another regulated, detail-heavy industry, or for a product with both a professional/clinical audience and a consumer audience

Compensation \& Benefits

Salary

$145,000 – $190,000, commensurate with experience

Equity

Meaningful equity stake in a high-growth, venture-backed company

Medical

Full medical, dental, and vision coverage

Growth

Direct access to founders and an agile team where your impact is visible

PTO

Unlimited PTO to recharge when you need it

Location

• New York City preferred. We are hybrid and currently spend a few days per week in our DUMBO, Brooklyn office. We will consider fully remote for the right candidate.