ciphers™ is an independent software and AI lab in Mumbai. We research consequential Indian workflows and turn the strongest product theses into focused experiments. Our current experiment is Startaflo™, a proposed founder operating system for the administrative life of an Indian company. It is at public-waitlist stage and is not publicly released.
Our products must make complex work easier to understand without pretending the complexity does not exist. That creates a particular kind of design problem: the interface must stay calm while preserving state, responsibility, evidence, exceptions, and consequences.
We are looking for a product designer who can move from field research and workflow modelling to a production interface with equal seriousness. You will work closely with engineering and product thinking from the beginning, not receive a settled feature list after the important decisions have already been made.
This role suits someone who enjoys information-rich B2B products, can distinguish necessary complexity from accidental complexity, and is willing to learn the domain deeply enough to challenge the brief.
- Plan and conduct focused research with founders, operators, and relevant domain participants.
- Map workflows, entities, decisions, hand-offs, exceptions, evidence, and the points where people lose context.
- Turn that understanding into information architecture, interaction models, prototypes, and production-ready interface design.
- Design states beyond the happy path: empty, loading, blocked, overdue, conflicting, unauthorised, failed, and complete.
- Work directly with engineers through implementation, review the built result, and resolve trade-offs without losing the product intent.
- Evolve a coherent design system across public and product surfaces while avoiding a component library that ignores the actual workflow.
- Use clear product language so users can understand what applies, what changed, and what happens next.
In the first months, success means building a grounded understanding of the Startaflo problem and making one meaningful workflow substantially more legible. Your work should show the reasoning behind the interface: which information is primary, which decisions need explanation, where confidence or uncertainty should be visible, and how the system helps a person recover when something goes wrong.
Over time, you will help establish a design practice that makes quality repeatable across experiments. That includes research records, design principles, reusable patterns, accessible interaction behaviour, and a strong review loop with engineering.
- A portfolio that demonstrates product design for complex workflows, B2B tools, operational systems, or information-dense products.
- Strong interaction and information-architecture skills, not only visual styling.
- The ability to explain the problem, constraints, alternatives, and your own contribution—not only show final screens.
- Proficiency with Figma or an equivalent collaborative design tool and comfort preparing work for implementation.
- Practical understanding of responsive design, accessibility, content hierarchy, and browser behaviour.
- Clear communication and comfort working in a small team with broad ownership.
We care more about evidence of careful thinking and shipped outcomes than a particular education path or title history.
- Experience designing for Indian businesses, regulated workflows, document-heavy processes, or products that involve professional services.
- Familiarity with HTML and CSS, design tokens, component APIs, or the trade-offs engineers face when implementing an interface.
- Experience designing AI-assisted interactions with visible sources, review, correction, and uncertainty.
- Research or writing that shows how you think about systems, language, and user trust.
We prefer evidence to theatre, thoughtful urgency to performative urgency, and clarity to novelty for its own sake. Designers are expected to care about the underlying model, the words in the interface, accessibility, and the quality of the shipped implementation.
The published role page will state the working model and any role-specific process before applications open. We do not collect speculative applications for unpublished roles.
Applications will be accepted through this role page only when the opening is published. Show one or two projects in enough depth that we can understand the operating problem, your decisions, the trade-offs, your personal contribution, and what changed after the work reached users. A clear case study is more useful than a large gallery of polished frames.
