Founding designer (brand, web & product)

Location:

Remote. US, UK or Europe; you'll need at least four working hours overlapping Mountain Time. The range below is for US-based candidates and is adjusted by location elsewhere.

Reports to:

Growth lead, with regular meetings with the executive team for brand work.

About Breathe for Change

Breathe for Change is building the category of Human Intelligence in Education to address the crises of educator stress and burnout, student mental health, and AI disruption. Our accredited higher-education program, a Master of Science in Education in Transformative Teaching & Learning awarded by William Jewell College and accredited by the Higher Learning Commission, equips educators with the human skills they and their students need most to thrive. More than 20,000 educators in every U.S. state have come through our programs. We reach teachers through TeacherCon, our free three-day online event, through paid social, email and a podcast, and we enroll them through honest conversations with our Educator Development Counselors.

The role

You'll be our first design hire. You'll own how Breathe for Change looks everywhere a prospective student meets us, and you'll make it yourself: the website, the curriculum made visual, email, paid-social creative, event materials, brand. The heart of it is making a complicated thing legible: a 30-credit, three-semester master's and a five-layer Human Intelligence framework, explained visually, in a sequence a tired teacher can follow in one scroll.

This is a making role. You design in Figma and you build what you design, in Webflow, Framer or front-end code. Direction comes from our growth lead and our exec team; the craft, the system and the shipped work come from you. There is a mountain of hands-on design to do, and we'd rather hire one person who can do it beautifully than a director who can't.

Your first big project is already scoped: a refresh of our website, borrowing the clarity of the best program sites in education while keeping our brand. You design it. You build it. It's the fastest way for both of us to see what working together is really like.

Where it grows.

We don't have a product engineering team yet, so product design here starts with the student-facing surfaces we already ship: onboarding, program materials, the theme and content of the learning platform our partner college provides, and the dashboards and AI tools our team runs on. The first one is student onboarding. As we build more of the student experience, you're the designer in the room from the start, and because you build, you'll ship a good deal of it yourself with AI-assisted tooling and our technology lead on the plumbing. It's not the core of the role, but the information design you do on the website becomes the design language for everything a student touches.

Three things to know about how we work, because they tell you whether this seat is for you:

• You'd be making, not managing We have agencies and freelancers who produce at volume, and a growth lead who sets direction. What we don't have is one person who can take a page from blank to shipped, or an email from brief to sent, and make it look like us. This seat is in Figma and the site builder most of the day.
• We're small, flat and fast The founders are still in the work. Decisions get made in a conversation, not a committee. You'll work with our co-founder, who is the voice and face of the brand, and with the people who run growth, enrollment and product. We use AI in nearly every workflow and expect you to as well.
• We sell a regulated degree with integrity, structurally Teachers are trust professionals and our buyers for life. Every public claim about the degree has to be exact: who awards it, what it costs, what it can and cannot promise. That's a design constraint, not a legal footnote, and the best work here makes the truth land harder than hype would.

What you'll actually do

• Bring the brand and curriculum to life. Turn the program, the framework and the accreditation story into pages, sequences, diagrams and decks that a prospective student grasps at a glance. This is the core of the job.
• Design and build the website. Sequence the story, design the system, build the pages (Webflow, Framer or code; you choose and make the case), ship, and iterate on what the data says.
• Design email. Lifecycle and campaign email in HubSpot: templates, hero creative, the weekly sends that matter.
• Design the ad-creative system. The visual language for paid social and the first batches yourself; our production partners scale it from there.
• Design the student surfaces we ship. Starting with onboarding, then program materials and the learning platform's theme, with our product lead.
• Carry the brand into everything. Event materials, decks, documents, internal tools. Shape headlines and copy as you design.

Who we're looking for

• Someone who explains complicated things visually. You've turned a complex product, program or curriculum into a visual system people could follow: program pages, course maps, explainers, decks. We weight this at least as heavily as ad creative.
• Someone who builds. You've shipped marketing websites you built yourself, in Webflow, Framer or code, and you can show us which parts you built.
• A senior generalist. 7+ years designing for consumer brands, ideally with a stretch as the first or only designer somewhere, or a freelance practice with real clients.
• Performance-literate. You've designed email and paid-social creative with the numbers in front of you, and changed what you made because of them.
• Fluent in the tools. Figma, one site builder, basic video editing. Motion is a plus.
• A writer by necessity. You can shape a headline and cut a paragraph in half, and you'd rather cut than add.
• In the open. You show work early, ask for the number, and change your mind when the data says to.

Nice to have:

you've designed customer-facing product surfaces (an app, a portal, an onboarding flow) and carried a brand into them. Education or mission-driven consumer experience. AI-native design and build workflows.

You do NOT need education-industry experience. We'll teach you the program, the audience and the rules. What we can't teach is taste and the ability to ship.

Growth

This is the first design seat at the company, and it grows with the work. As the engine scales, so does the team around you: production, video, and whoever else the work needs. You'd shape that from the inside, having built the system yourself first.

How we'll hire

A portfolio screen, a paid design-and-build exercise for finalists (a real page of ours, your sequence, one section built live; about six to eight hours, paid), and one conversation with the founders. We move in weeks, not months.

Compensation & benefits

Base salary: $130,000–$165,000 for US-based candidates, depending on experience and the depth of what you've shipped; adjusted by location elsewhere

• Stock options
• Health, vision and dental insurance
• 401k and FSA/HSA eligibility
• Unlimited PTO

How to apply

The application asks for three live sites you built, one piece where you explained something complicated visually, one email or ad, and five sentences on what you'd cut from one of our pages. Those matter more than your résumé, and we read every answer.

Breathe for Change is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.