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Mariana Minerals is a software-first, vertically integrated minerals company reimagining the critical minerals supply chain through advanced software, automation, and data-driven decision-making. The company serves the modern energy, AI, and defense technology sectors.
You will be the first dedicated design hire, responsible for bringing MarianaOS—an internal operational software platform—to the next level. This role focuses on taking genuinely complicated, data-heavy workflows and making them intuitive and human-centered. You'll work across engineering and product teams to ensure the platform is both easy to use and manages tremendous underlying complexity.
Key responsibilities include:
- Designing clear information architecture and flows for complex, data-dense workflows used daily by hundreds of employees
- Growing and owning the design system, including coded components alongside Figma files, enabling engineers to build great UIs with agentic tools
- Partnering with PMs and engineers from problem framing through shipped UI, participating in the messy early stages rather than just receiving specs
- Prototyping directly in code when fastest; pairing with engineers rather than only handing off mocks
- Setting short-horizon design direction (weeks to months) to keep a fast-shipping team coherent
- Running lightweight user research and feedback loops with customers and internal stakeholders
- Defining design best practices and ways of working as the company scales
The company is optimizing for: simplifying complexity (the top priority), complex product experience (especially data-heavy or operational products), opinionated visual design direction that modernizes mining aesthetics, collaborative cross-functional instincts, and AI fluency. You should already use AI tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or v0 as part of your workflow and be comfortable designing in the open rather than fully specifying upfront.
This is not primarily a pixel-polish role. The ideal candidate is a seasoned specialist with deep experience simplifying complex data workflows, ideally someone who has been a first designer at a startup before. Given the high engineer-to-designer ratio, a junior designer may struggle. Unconventional backgrounds (design-minded product builders, engineers who love design) are welcome if you demonstrate strong judgment on complex problems.
