Tephra Labs Jobs

About Tephra Labs

• Tephra Labs builds technologies that enable individuals and organizations around the world to have more ownership, autonomy, and access. We’re a group of motivated and hardworking individuals who are here to build important solutions that last.
• At the moment, we’re laser focused on bringing Fern to market. Fern is a new kind of financial product designed to increase global access to opportunities, financial inclusion, and financial ownership. Fern is a multi-currency account product combining global fiat and cryptocurrencies, with an ecosystem of Fern applications. Fern alpha is launching Q4 2023.
• We’re a small team with experience from Stanford, Wharton, Berkeley, UCLA, Protocol Labs (IPFS, Filecoin), SuperRare, LinkedIn, Stripe, Google, X, and more.
• We raised a $5m seed round in August 2022. We are a fully remote team with a hub in New York City and teammates in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Mexico City.
  
  

What the job entails

This is a founding team role. We’re at the early stages of building new products and technology, and need someone who is interested in greenfield problem-solving and the demands of working at an early-stage startup.

Being a Founding Product Designer & Strategist at Tephra Labs will entail:

• Understanding and contributing to the product vision for Fern and other Tephra Labs products
• Taking high-level product ideas and conversations, deeply understanding the product needs, and outputting product design flows (0 to 1 design work with low to medium levels of documentation)
• Collaborating on PRDs to produce high-quality product documentation and align all teammates as needed
• Hands-on product design work for various products, starting with Fern
• Hands-on brand design work, and/or working with external vendors to execute exceptional quality brand and website design
• Maintaining great relationships with others on the team and working collaboratively with product, engineering, and other functions to develop a comprehensive understanding of project scope and manage necessary/unnecessary complexity
• Owning your work end-to-end, i.e. the job doesn’t stop at delivering designs, but also includes ownership of the final work that is shipped and ensuring that it is high-quality and delivers a great user experience
• Being flexible with your day-to-day activities, and ready to re-prioritize workstreams based on evolving information
• Solving hard problems creatively, and iterating until we get it right
  
  

Who we’re looking for in this role

We’re looking for a Founding Product Designer & Strategist who takes pride in being one of the absolute best at what they do. We’re a small team, so your impact on defining product strategy and direction will be massive. Because of that potential for impact, we’re being really careful about who we work with in this role.

You may be a fit for this role if:

• You obsess over every detail of your work, and will stop at nothing until you deliver an exceptional user experience
• You could have been anything (a computer scientist, engineer, product manager, researcher), but actively chose to be a designer because that’s how you wanted to build things in the world
• You think like a product manager, and you’re a master of Figma
• You have 5+ years of experience working in-house as a professional designer, and ideally 2+ years as a senior designer or design team lead
• You’re a badass IC and enjoy doing IC work, and also want to grow and lead a design team one day
• You either already are or are working to become one of the best in the world at what you do
• You have exceptional work ethic and you move ultra-fast
• You’re technically fluent, and can earn the respect of engineers and anyone you work with
• You are ready for and interested in the startup life – i.e. you understand that your job (and everyone’s job) isn’t done until the job is done
• You own a project from start to finish, including post-implementation/engineering handoff to make sure the final user experience is great
• You want to work with a team of motivated and curious people who are here to build something truly exceptional. You are an A+-player who wants to be part of an A+-team
• You want to work closely with the company CEO to define product direction and strategy
• You’re energetic, hungry, and are motivated by hard problems
• You don’t mind working long hours, nights, and weekends
• You’re based in New York City and you’re willing to come into an office several days a week to collaborate with a team
• You have a rich life outside of work
• Bonus points if you have prior web3 experience
  
  

Compensation

We use a salary function at Tephra Labs to ensure consistency and fairness across all contributors to Tephra Labs. Compensation is a mix of salary, equity, (in the future) tokens, and benefits.

• Salary: $180-204k, depending on level
• Equity: 0.25-1%, depending on level
• Benefits:
• Top-tier medical, dental, vision, life, disability insurance (100% of employee premiums and 50% of dependent premiums)
• Stipend for workspace setup
• Monthly cell/internet bonus
• Annual professional development stipend
• Time off:
• Flexible time off
• 12 weeks fully paid parental leave