About this Product Designer role at Collate
About Collate
Collate is an AI document generation platform for life sciences. We automate paperwork with AI, helping our customers get life-saving innovations to patients years faster. Collate is an end-to-end solution, powering every step of drug, diagnostic, and medical device development—from concept to market.
Our CEO Surbhi Sarna (https://www.linkedin.com/in/surbhi-sarna/) is a former General Partner at Y Combinator. Surbhi founded nVision Medical, which developed a new method to detect ovarian cancer and was acquired by Boston Scientific. Our CTO Nate Smith (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nateps/) is a former Visiting Partner at Y Combinator and founder of Lever. Our AI researchers, engineers, and designers have worked at Google, Nvidia, Meta, Netflix, Amazon, AirBnB, Hippocratic AI, and Grail, and 40% of our team are former founders.
We're an elite team, with $125M in funding from top investors (Redpoint, First Round Capital, CRV, Conviction, Y Combinator) and leaders in healthcare and AI. This is a rare chance to join an early-stage company with world-changing potential, experienced founders, and resources to execute at scale.
About the Role
Collate is the first of its kind for what we're building — no incumbent doing this today, and no established workflow to copy. That's the job: design the interface patterns for an AI category that doesn't exist yet, then ship them.
You'll co-own, along with our Head of Design and Lead Designer, the product surface end to end that lets the world's most regulated companies trust us with their most sensitive documents. You'll sit at the intersection of engineering and product, working directly with Surbhi (CEO) to turn what customers need into interfaces the team can actually ship.
This is a rare seat: you're not maintaining a design system, you're contributing to the visual and interaction language for a new category. It's a role for someone who wants outsized ownership over how an early-stage company becomes the category leader without slowing down.
What You'll Do
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Help define the design language for how Collate's AI capabilities show up to organizations operating under real regulatory pressure
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Turn ambiguous, technical, and compliance-heavy workflows into interfaces that feel simple and trustworthy
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Create mockups, prototypes, and high-fidelity visuals to communicate ideas and describe execution
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Partner daily with engineering and product to scope, prioritize, and ship — this is a hands-on, in-the-weeds role, not a hand-off role
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Contribute to the craft bar for the product — interaction design, visual design, and the details that build trust with enterprise, regulated customers
What We're Looking For
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5+ years of product design experience with a track record of shipping software end to end (not just concepting)
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A builder's instinct — you'd rather be in Figma next to an engineer than presenting a polished deck
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High agency and comfort with ambiguity; you can walk into a fast-moving, lightly-processed environment and bring structure without slowing anyone down
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Genuine comfort working directly with founders and engineers on 0-to-1 problems — you're energized by ambiguity, not looking for it to be resolved before you start, and your communication style is clear and direct
Why Join Collate?
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Impact: Build systems and experiences that touch real patients and providers, improving healthcare outcomes.
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Ownership: Shape both our product experience and our engineering culture from the start.
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Learning: Collaborate with a uniquely interdisciplinary team—AI researchers, healthcare leaders, and experienced startup builders.
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Upside: Join a company early enough to have meaningful equity and career-defining impact.
The base salary range for this role is competitive, depending on experience and level (Tier 1, San Francisco)
