Founding Design Engineer
Sonia
San FranciscoFull Time120K - 180Kengineering
Equity: 0.25% - 0.75%
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4 other open positions
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Sonia
4 other open positions
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Our sole focus is to build a safe AI therapist clinically as effective as the 99th percentile human therapist and to make mental health support accessible to anyone. After 12 months of exploring all sorts of architectures, form factors, and approaches, we have recently had a major breakthrough. As of a few weeks ago, we now have a version with which we are starting to see very significant clinical outcomes in the form of GAD-7 (anxiety score) reductions even just after 2 weeks of using Sonia. We are receiving messages daily of how it’s changing people’s lives. We’re just at the start and there is still so much to do and build. Now it’s time to move fast and scale the team.
We are currently a 5 person team based in San Francisco and have raised $3.5m from top investors including Y Combinator, Moonfire, and the founders of Verkada, Reddit, and Instacart.
Sonia exists in the form of a SwiftUI mobile app. We are convinced design is incredibly important for a product like ours. Think about it - it’s what humans will see and interact with during their most emotional moments. Every smile we can put on their face, every cognitive load we can reduce, every way we can foster trust, and every distraction or annoyance we avoid, can have a significant impact on their wellbeing and thus our success.
While most of our team’s capacity is of course spent on the AI and engineering work to build the actual AI therapy session, we believe that the UI/UX both during the session and outside (e.g. reviewing sessions, doing personalized exercises) has a crucial impact on the final product.
Some questions you will obsess about in your first months:
Clearly at our team size it doesn’t make sense to have someone solely focused on design. You will essentially be a blend of a product manager, designer, and frontend engineer. You will have end-to-end ownership in helping us figure out what to build, how it should feel/look, and then also support us on the implementation.
Here is a typical workflow:
Of course, not every day will be the same and there are many other areas where we are looking for design-adjacent support. E.g., we need a new website soon, have a lot of incredibly messy internal tooling, need to build onboarding flows for research participants, and much more. On some days, something comes up that is just so important that every single one of us jumps on it and makes sure it gets done asap.
It will definitely not get boring and you need to get your hands dirty - but the main responsibility is the look and feel of the Sonia mobile app.
We care about three things - kindness, hard work and intelligence. We only want people who genuinely are interested (ideally obsessed) about making the world a happier place and are ready to work (very) hard to make people smile at scale. For the most part, we work 6-7 days a week in person in SF and are at the office 8-8 on weekdays. It will be intense, but we have a lot of fun and are basically all best friends. And trust me — being on a user interview where someone is crying telling you how your software changed their life and is the reason they have a job again — is the most rewarding thing ever and makes it all worth it. Additionally, you can count on me personally doing everything I possibly can to make you happy, successful and fulfilled at Sonia.
