Head of Design

Cardinal is the AI platform for precision outbound. We run outbound for 40+ YC companies, including Mintlify, Greptile, and Luminai.

"Spray and pray" outbound is dead. The best sales teams operate with extreme precision — finding things in common with customers, monitoring their content, mapping inbound signals, and tracking website visitors. But doing this well means stringing together 10+ tools and hiring a GTM engineer. Cardinal replaces all of that.

Our AI agents find hyper-targeted leads, continuously monitor what prospects are posting and engaging with on social media, generate personalized snippets based on shared context, and orchestrate end-to-end outbound workflows across email and LinkedIn. Cardinal also captures inbound from website visitors, product signups, ad impressions, and social engagement — qualifying and routing them into sequences automatically.

Cardinal is founded by Devi and Jianna, 2x YC founders (S23, W26) and Harvard/MIT CS alums. Their last company, Leafpress, was an energy software company where they closed customers like Lindt and Honeywell from cold outbound.

Cardinal is building the AI platform for precision outbound.

We help the best companies run world-class sales — combining data, AI, and execution into one system that actually drives revenue.

• $1M ARR run rate in ~2 months
• ~$80k MRR and growing fast
• Backed by Y Combinator
• Built by 2x YC founders (Harvard + MIT + Prod)

We’re moving fast, closing top customers, and becoming the default outbound stack for the best teams.

This is not a normal design role.

You’re not just designing - you’re:

• Defining how the product feels end-to-end
• Owning the entire user experience (from first impression → daily usage)
• Turning complex workflows into simple, intuitive interfaces
• Acting as a bridge between product, engineering, and growth

This role is core to the company.

Design directly impacts how fast we grow.

• Own product UX across the entire platform (0 → 1 and beyond)
• Design and ship in Framer (site updates, landing pages, growth pages)
• Turn messy workflows into clean, intuitive UX
• Create one-pagers, sales collateral, and marketing assets
• Produce videos and visual content for product + growth
• Improve onboarding and time-to-value (first response is everything)
• Work closely with founders + engineers to ship fast
• Continuously iterate based on real user feedback

We’re looking for scrappy, high-agency builders who care deeply about product.

You might be:

• A former founder
• An early designer at a startup
• Someone who has built and shipped products end-to-end

You:

• Have strong product taste and high standards
• Are extremely hands-on (you design and think in systems)
• Move fast and don’t wait for perfect specs
• Care about how things work, not just how they look
• Can simplify complex problems into clear UX
• Want to win — and are willing to hustle for it

Cardinal's stack is built for speed and scale:

• Frontend: Next.js + React + TypeScript + Tailwind CSS
• Backend: Multiple FastAPI microservices handling search, enrichment, sequencing, inbox, and webhooks
• Database: Supabase (PostgreSQL) + Redis for caching and job queues
• AI: LLM-powered agents for lead discovery, content monitoring, snippet generation, and intelligent sequence personalization

Hard problems we're solving: building AI agents that understand sales context, real-time content monitoring and signal detection across social platforms, multi-channel sequence orchestration across dozens of email domains, and enrichment pipelines that operate at scale.