Founding Product Designer
- £60k – £90k 0.5% – 1.0%
- Remote (Everywhere)
- Full Time
About the job
HARMONICA
We are a London based stealth startup (ex Revolut, Meta, Imperial PhD) building the defining AI company for ageing. Ageing is one of society’s biggest problems, and for us it’s personal. We’re an expat team building for our own ageing parents, who live far away in China, India, Brazil, and Italy.
We build voice first technology to keep seniors at home, healthier and happier for longer.
Our first product is Olympia, a proactive voice assistants for older adults living at home. She provides conversation and stimulation, remembers what matters, connects the family, and notices changes in wellbeing. Real seniors already use her in real homes. She’s voice-first, proactive, and gets more useful the longer she knows someone.
Hear what it means to live with Olympia from one of our user: https://canva.link/ay0pj21d8yt6k6y
OUR AMBITION
By 2050, the number of people over 80 will triple, and care systems are already running out of money, workers, and capacity. Today’s system sees the cliff: the fall, the hospital admission, the crisis. Olympia sees the drift, and acts while the problem is still small.
We’re here to win the category. The opportunity is massive: this is where tech meets good, at the scale of how the world ages. Daily use of Olympia builds a picture of how people age that nobody has had before: cognition, mood, routines, mobility, social connection. Across millions of homes, that intelligence lets families act earlier, helps clinicians support far more people, and saves billions in care spending. Harmonica becomes the infrastructure an ageing world runs on.
Five-year goal: 250,000 homes, $170M revenue. You’d be one of the first designers shaping the product that gets us there.
WHO WE ARE
Team from Meta, Revolut, Tractable, and an Imperial PhD in voice AI. We’ve built consumer products at scale, taken AI products from pilots to eight-figure contracts, and worked at the frontier of real-time speech.
Backed by Eileen Burbidge’s NFG Ventures, Mati Staniszewski of ElevenLabs, and many more, with research collaborators at Oxford, Wharton, and Toronto.
THE DESIGN PROBLEM
Most software assumes the user will learn its interface. We’re building an interface that learns the person.
What should an AI companion become when its users did not grow up with software? A human face, an abstract presence, or voice alone? When should it speak first? How does it show it is listening, remembering, acting? These are not polish questions. They decide whether an 84-year-old trusts Olympia enough to speak with her every day.
You’ll answer them through rapid experiments with real seniors in real homes. This interaction model barely exists as a discipline. You’ll help invent it.
WHAT WE’LL DO TOGETHER
Have the best time of your career working on an awesome, meaningful product with super talented people.
- A voice-first interaction model: turn-taking, interruptions, silence, proactive moments, recovery when Olympia gets it wrong. Less like operating software, more like being understood.
- A generative interface system: the screen assembles the right thing around the conversation (a memory, crossword, reminder, photo) and stays coherent, accessible, trustworthy.
- Embodiment grounded in evidence. Avatar, abstract presence, or voice alone? Prototype, test during onboarding, learn what works.
- A calm, accessible home experience. Legible with low vision, forgiving of shaky hands, warm without being childish or clinical.
- The family connection loop. Messaging that turns everyday moments into reassurance and prompts like , while protecting the older adult’s agency and privacy.
- An agent that can act: medication, appointments, transport, everyday tasks through conversation.
- A research and experimentation engine. Fast prototypes, field tests, clear measures of trust. We have hypotheses; you replace them with evidence.
A specialist studio handles marketing and visual identity. This role owns the product experience: interaction system, generative UI, embodiment, accessibility.
WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR
- Obsessed with human-computer interaction and the future of AI interfaces. You have opinions on why today’s voice assistants feel awkward, and the curiosity to test them.
- You think in systems, behaviours, and moments, not screens.
- You prototype to learn: Figma, code, motion, AI tools, whatever gets an idea in front of a user fastest.
- You do your own research. Sit with an older adult, notice what they do rather than what they say.
- You know how hard simple is. Accessibility is part of the architecture, not a checklist.
- Shipped consumer products. Your portfolio shows craft and what changed after real people used it.
- High agency. You’d rather test a rough version in a home this week than wait for a perfect brief.
- You care about the mission. Low ego, kind, hard-working. No politics.
BONUS
- Voice UI, conversational design, generative interfaces, motion, front-end prototyping, health or care products, designing for older adults.
WHAT WE DON’T CARE ABOUT
- Where you went to university, or whether you did. Show us the work and how you think.
- Where you live. Overlap with London hours matters more than your postcode.
- Gender, age, background, or anything else that isn’t the work.
FOUNDING DESIGNER MEANS FOUNDING
You will be integral to whether Harmonica succeeds. That’s literal, and it comes with the freedom to match.
- Set the design bar: how we research, prototype, test, and decide something is ready for a home.
- Shape product strategy. Design is not downstream here. You help decide what Olympia becomes and what we refuse to build.
- Build on a working foundation. Olympia is already used by real seniors.
- Create the design system that keeps generative interfaces coherent as the product adapts to each person.
- Hire the team. Shape future design roles.
- Real equity and a real voice in product and company decisions.
- You’ll learn more here in one year than in three at a corporate. That’s a promise.
THE PACKAGE
- 0.5% to 1% equity, depending on seniority, on a standard four-year vest.
- What that could be worth. If we hit the plan ($170M revenue in year five), a business like ours trades at roughly 5x to 10x revenue, putting Harmonica between $850M and $1.7B. After typical dilution from future rounds, your stake would be worth in the region of $2.5M to $10M+. This is a projection, not a guarantee; startups fail, and we’re telling you what we’re aiming at.
- Competitive salary.
- Hardware, tooling, research, and model spend. Nobody waits for approval to test a promising idea.
- Maximum creative freedom, and a team building this for our own parents.
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