Founding Designer

About Sonia

We're building a safe AI therapist that's clinically as effective as the best human therapists—and making it accessible to everyone at a fraction of the cost. We've recently had a major breakthrough. We're now seeing significant clinical outcomes on anxiety and depression symptoms after just 2 weeks of use, and receiving daily messages about how Sonia is changing lives.

We're a 6-person team in San Francisco, backed by Y Combinator, Moonfire, and founders of Verkada, Reddit, and Instacart ($3.5M raised).

The role

Sonia is a voice-first iOS app. Design matters deeply here because this is what people see during their most vulnerable moments. Every detail that builds trust, reduces friction, or brings a moment of calm directly impacts their wellbeing.

You'll own the end-to-end design of the Sonia app experience. No prior coding skills required, but we'll teach you how to vibe code your own prototypes and features :)

Questions You'll Obsess Over

• What should appear on screen during a voice therapy session to reduce anxiety and increase engagement?
• How do we make "therapeutic homework" between sessions actually compelling? (Almost nobody does it in traditional therapy, but it drives outcomes.)
• How do we add human warmth and community to an AI-first experience?
• What should the AI automatically personalize vs. what belongs in settings?
  
  

What The Work Looks Like

• Talk to users and dig into interaction data
• Ideate on features with the team
• Design end-to-end flows
• Prototype with AI tools, hand off the rest to our excellent engineering team
  
  

You'll also jump into other design needs: website, internal tools, research onboarding flows — whatever might come up.

Culture

We're kind to each other, we work hard, and we are thoughtful about what we're building. We work 6 days a week together in our office in downtown SF. It's challenging, but when your work helps someone get through their day a little easier, it doesn't feel like sacrifice. We eat lunch and dinner as a team and nerd out about whatever we’re currently working on :)

Who we are looking for

• Experience designing mobile apps, preferably at a previous startup
• Someone who tries to use AI tools for everything and realizes they can now individually get the work done which previously took 5 people to complete
• Someone highly creative - a lot of UI best practices should be rethought and reinvented for AI apps
• Experience working with and prompting AI models (at least to the extent of having a very good sense of what they can and can’t do. Many of our features will have some LLM component and it is important for you to understand the action space in which you can ideate)
  
  

A few user stories from the past weeks

• A person from Alabama who had such strong OCD and anxiety that they always needed to turn around with the car 3-4 times to check whether they actually turned off the stove. Sonia helped them get it down to one.
• A women from the south who lives in a rural area with no therapist in proximity from her Blue Shield insurance. She has been unemployed for the past 15 years and told us that due to her chats with Sonia she gained the courage to apply for jobs again. A few days later, just before her user interview with us, she got accepted to her job and is now employed again.
• A user who had spammed my personal phone number about how good Sonia is and how she is trying to get her fiancé to use the app because she thinks it will save their marriage. Turns out he doesn’t have an iPhone so we bought him one to try it out.
• The parent of 2 incarcerated sons, has built out a mantra with Sonia and is now able to go through her days with more acceptance and peace. Something that according to her, her weekly Monday morning therapist that she has been seeing for a long time hasn’t managed to achieve.