About us

Thoughtful makes it easy to spend more time on the content you love—instead of what’s trending on social media today. By transforming wasted downtime in toxic social media apps into time spent going deeper on your interests, learning, and growing, Thoughtful makes you happier and healthier every day.

We’re a small team with decades of experience at companies like Facebook and Apple. Our CEO, Brian Amerige, was one of the 20 engineers who built Facebook’s first native iPhone app, before tech-leading Paper, and then starting+leading the engineering and design teams responsible for the Facebook experience on all platforms. Alex Epstein, co-founder, has started multiple profitable content businesses and leads our strategy to ensure the technology we build is deeply optimized to help people flourish.

How Thoughtful works

1. Thoughtful brings together all the sources of interesting and good-for-you content you know about—podcasts, YouTube channels, Substacks, articles, Kindle books, and Audible audiobooks—into a single place. You consume all of this content directly in Thoughtful, where your place is automatically saved. This content exists in endless quantity on the Internet, but it’s usually drowned out by low-value junk, and spread out in many places, which makes it difficult to find and focus on.

2. When you open Thoughtful, we make it easy to focus on the content that you value most in the moment, whether you want to read, watch, or listen, and whether you want to focus on (in our CEO’s case) tech, philosophy, or snowboarding. The secret sauce is that no matter the context, in Thoughtful there’s always something that’s both interesting and good for you.

Learn more about Thoughtful here.

What we’re looking for

We’re looking for our first designer—to elevate our brand and take ownership of all upcoming design projects across our iOS and Mac apps, website, upcoming marketing campaigns, and user communications. Working alongside Brian, Alex, and our small team (eng + marketing), you’ll be deeply involved with nearly every step of product development—from ideation to launch.

This role is part-time (approximately 5 hours per week), but with potential to grow into a full-time, design lead position as the company grows.

As a result, we’re looking for someone who cares deeply about our mission—building a future where digital downtime is dominated not by reactivity and toxicity, but learning, growth, and going deeper on your interests—and is excited about the prospect of working together over the long-term to bring it to life.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience, with an extensive portfolio demonstrating exceptional production quality in both graphic design and UI design projects

• Strong interest in working with UI engineers that are capable of building pixel-perfect designs and industry-leading interactions and animations

• Deep familiarity with Apple’s HIG

• Excellent communication skills

• Interested in occasional in-person collaboration (all expenses paid)

Pay & benefits

• $75-$100/hr, depending on skills, experience, and scope

• Potential path toward full-time, design lead position (salary + equity between 0.75% and 3%—our most recent valuation (seed) was $18M as of June 2024)

Learn more about who we are and the company we're building