Forward Deployed Designer - (Remote + Onsite Miami)

Company
Braintrust is a global talent network that connects top independent professionals with leading companies for high-quality, flexible work. We help organizations hire skilled talent faster while giving professionals access to vetted opportunities with innovative teams.

Job description

The one-line ask. We need a world-class product designer who can sit in a room with real users, redesign an AI product at AI speed until those users adopt it, and be onsite in Miami for a kickoff workshop on June 22–24, 2026. This brief describes exactly who that person is so you can recognize them on sight.

1. The context

100x builds AI assistants for financial services. The first is Infinityy, an AI real estate assistant; an AI loan originator is next, with more behind it. We embed a small, elite team onto each product and make it undeniable, then move to the next one.

The role we’re filling is a Forward Deployed Designer (FDD). The model is Palantir’s forward-deployed engineer — the person who embeds in a customer’s office and builds until the problem is solved, no hand-holding, the outcome on their shoulders — but for design. The FDD drops onto an AI product that works but isn’t winning, lives with its real users, and redesigns it until they adopt it.

The first project — Infinityy. It has raised $17.5M. About 1,000 Miami brokers have signed up, and not one has upgraded to the paid tier at $49/month. The price is already validated by the regional MLS, so price was never the question. The product is good; what it lacks is a design that earns the upgrade. The job is simple to state and hard to do: make the brokers pay.

2. The shape of the work

• A 24-hour design loop. By day, sit with brokers and watch where they get stuck. By night, design the fix. By morning, bring the new screen back. An engineering bench ships the build overnight, and every change is measured against an adoption score — keep what moves the number.
• Onsite first, remote after. Each project opens with an intense onsite discovery sprint in Miami — a live workshop with brokers, working sessions, presenting, and training the team — then shifts to remote build from home.
• Two phases, ~3 months each, each with a hard gate. Phase 1 (redesign) is judged on reaching a net-disappointment score of 45%+ — the line above which users won’t give the product up. Phase 2 (launch and scale) is judged on an average customer-satisfaction score of 8.5/10 across the broker cohort.
• Forward-deployed means physical. The end users are working real-estate agents. You only understand them by observing them in their real environment — not over Zoom. Being in the room for the kickoff is the entire point of it.
• Three surfaces to redesign on Infinityy: the agent dashboard (scoring, ranking, follow-up), the scheduling layer (broker-friendly callbacks), and a presence-and-language layer (live human/AI handoff, with listings readable in 75 languages).

3. Who we’re looking for

“A McKinsey consultant’s range, with the taste of Jony Ive.”

That line is the bar. Concretely, we look for five things:

• World-class taste. Has shipped things people refuse to give up — not mockups that die in a Figma file — and the portfolio proves it in the first ten seconds. Can say in one sentence why the iPhone feels inevitable while most products feel assembled.
• World-class empathy. Sits with a room of users, sees where they stall, and feels the one pain none of them named. Designs the feeling, not the screen. Holds their own with a founder of thirty-two years and a room of twenty-five brokers.
• World-class speed. Designs in Claude and the newest AI tools, not a Figma file three versions behind, and architects, builds, and ships as one person. A screen by end of day, the running code two days later.
• World-class ambition. Not here for a 10% improvement or even 10x — walks in to make the product 100x better, and takes the adoption and satisfaction numbers personally.
• Built for the sprint. Will fly to Miami for an intense onsite discovery sprint at the start of each assistant, then build remotely from home. Wants a book of these, not one gig. Maybe came from Palantir, maybe was a founding designer or a founder-CTO with real taste.

The framing that matters most

• A poet, not a quant — ideally both. We think of talent in two archetypes: quants (deeply analytical — our engineers) and poets (empaths, indexed on human experience — our designers). The FDD is a poet: the person who turns a user’s lived journey, pain, and pleasure into design, and who acts as the senior eye that reviews the work and fixes every imperfection. The rare person who is genuinely both poet and quant is exactly the bar.
• Taste over tooling. AI now produces the design output itself — a screen that once took months can be generated in hours. So the value is no longer “can you make a design.” It is: do you understand the client’s journey and pain deeply enough to direct it, and do you have the taste to know when a design can no longer be improved? It’s the difference between generating a song and knowing which song is a global hit.
• Taste comes from exposure. We need someone who has personally lived with world-class products and experiences and holds a strong, specific opinion on what “best” looks like — and where even the best still falls short.

4. Location, visa, and availability

• Based in a visa-waiver country, or already US-authorized. The designer can be based in any of the 42 US visa-waiver (ESTA) countries, or already hold a valid US visa or work authorization. They fly into Miami on an ESTA for the onsite sprint — no US visa wait, no relocation — then deliver from home.
• ESTA covers what this role needs onsite. Discovery, working sessions, presenting, and training the team are all consultant-facing work permitted on ESTA; the build itself happens remotely.
• Strongest-fit regions. Eastern Europe especially — deep exposure to world-class, Scandinavian-grade design sensibility — and Latin America. Practical best-fit countries: in the visa-waiver pool, Chile, Poland, Croatia, Hungary, Czechia, and the Baltics; and for anyone already holding a valid US visa, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Peru.
• Non-negotiable. No visa restriction that prevents US entry, and a genuine willingness to travel.
• Engagement. Roughly full-time (~40 hrs/week) and deeply hands-on with the engineering team. The first project runs three to six months and, done well, becomes a two-year and then four-year contract across new assistants and verticals. The first project is the whole audition; either side can walk at prorated pay, with no penalty.
• The critical date. The candidate must be onsite in Miami for the kickoff workshop on June 22–24, 2026, where roughly a dozen competing brokers convene to give live feedback. To make it, they would book travel the week of June 15 and land by June 22. Speed matters — we want this person engaged within days.

5. Not a fit

• Needs a brief, a backlog, or a design system handed to them.
• Can’t or won’t travel to the US, or can’t clear ESTA and holds no US authorization.
• Wants to run discovery over Zoom rather than in the room.
• A pure executor who treats the AI tool as the skill — we are hiring the taste and judgment above the tool, not the ability to operate it.

6. What we need from you

Surface people who clear this bar: world-class taste and empathy, AI-native speed, and the ambition to make a product 100x better — who can be onsite in Miami for June 22 and are available to start immediately. Please lead with portfolios that prove it in the first ten seconds. We would rather see two genuinely exceptional people than twenty who are merely available.