Sandbar - Founding Designer

About the job

Join as our first dedicated designer and build products to catch crime.

Sandbar:

Sandbar's mission is to catch criminals, improving the health of the global financial system by fighting financial crime like money laundering, human trafficking, terrorist financing, and more.

By law, financial institutions must monitor transactions for illicit activity. However, most institutions find it difficult to do so effectively. Roughly $6T is laundered every year and $180B is spent on anti-money-laundering efforts by US institutions. Despite this, less than 1% of laundered money is identified correctly. We are also seeing many systems produce false positive rates of over 95%. Consequently, banks and the government must spend extra time and resources on extraneous investigations, taking away resources from finding criminals.

Product:

To achieve our goal, we ingest and standardize millions of messy data points coming from financial institutions that may sign up for the service. Once we have standardized and ingested the data, we can run complex calculations on it, checking for suspicious behavior and building a score around the riskiness of a given profile. If anything is found, we can surface that to our clients. By providing information accessibility, building intuitive workflows, allowing for custom processing, and curating accurate data, we can reduce the false-positive rate of our calculations, and reduce the amount of work dedicated to a given investigation.

You:

We are looking for a designer who is excited about building a company from the ground up and reshaping an existing brand into a generational brand. As the founding designer at Sandbar, you'll be responsible for continuously pushing the Sandbar image to new heights. That includes reshaping the entire product interface, to truly innovating the website with a more self-service flow, creating performance marketing assets that're refreshing, and supporting our sales team with simple, enterprise sales collateral. You'll be pivotal in turning Sandbar into the go-to solution for 1,000s of fintechs and you'll work cross-functionally with the founders and core members of the team to solve real-world, challenging, and far reaching problems. You'll have a lot of autonomy and freedom. As we grow, you will be able to determine your own path and build skills you want to develop by directing your career growth and specialization. You're excited by and personally interested in how AI is reshaping they way we build products and solve problems; and you want to use it for positive far reaching, real-world impact.

Team:

We’re a small, but mighty and collaborative team based in NYC focused on delivering world class software for our clients. You will not be in NYC, but you will visit NYC every now and then. And multiple people from our NYC office will visit you more often; in-person collaboration is priceless in the early days of building an enduring business so we will do our best to continue that value with our Central and South American teammates. We've raised from some amazing investors and have a group of amazing advisors and partners who can help us build the right things. This includes 3 institutional VC funds––Lachy Groom, Abstract Ventures, and BoxGroup––and 45+ angel investors including founders, executives, and early employees of Ramp, Stripe, Plaid, Remitly, Revolut, Google, Open AI, Square, and more.

What you'll do:

• Lead Product Design: Craft user-centered designs for our core product, from user workflows to visual design and prototypes, ensuring a seamless and intuitive experience for our customers.

• Shape Our Brand: Develop and refine Sandbar.ai’s visual identity, including logo updates, typography, color palettes, and other brand guidelines that reflect our vision and purpose.

• Design the Website: Create and maintain a compelling web presence that communicates who we are and what we do, ensuring it is consistent with our overall brand.

• Marketing Materials: Design marketing assets for performance marketing channels like LinkedIn, X, Reddit and more and enterprise sales collateral such as PDFs, pitch decks, one-pagers, and to support all sales and marketing efforts.

• Establish Design Systems: Build and maintain a design system to create consistency across all platforms and make design a scalable part of our product development.

What you'll need:

• Experience: 5+ years of experience in design, ideally with experience in startups or fast paced environments.

• Portfolio: A portfolio demonstrating your ability to create elegant, user-centered designs and branding work.

• Tools: Proficiency in tools like Figma, Sketch, or Adobe Creative Suite.

• Versatility: Ability to work across product design, brand development, and marketing materials.

• Communication: Strong verbal and written communication skills to articulate design decisions and collaborate effectively with the team.

• Adaptability: Thrives in ambiguity and can balance strategic vision with hands-on execution.

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience designing for AI-driven products.

• Knowledge of front-end development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript).

• Prior experience shaping a startup’s brand from the ground up.