Designing Second Chances: The Founding Product Designer Role at Emerge Career

Emerge Career is seeking a Founding Product Designer to join their mission-driven team that's building technology to help justice-impacted individuals break the cycle of poverty and incarceration. The role offers a salary range of $120,000 to $200,000 plus 0.25% to 1.00% equity, with visa sponsorship available for the New York-based position.

The company has already achieved remarkable results, with an 89% graduation rate and 92% of graduates securing training-related employment, earning an average of $77,352 in their first year. This significantly outperforms traditional workforce development programs, which see only 38.6% employment rates and average first-year earnings of $34,708.

The Mission and Impact

Emerge Career's mission is to break the cycle of poverty and incarceration by creating pathways to real second chances. The platform serves as an all-in-one re-entry and workforce development training system deeply embedded within the criminal justice system. Their vision is to become the country's unified workforce development system, replacing disconnected brick-and-mortar job centers with one integrated, tech-powered solution.

The founders, Uzoma "Zo" Orchingwa and Gabriel Saruhashi, previously co-founded Ameelio, an award-winning tech nonprofit that dismantled the prison communication duopoly. Backed by tech luminaries like Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla, and Jack Dorsey, Ameelio served over 1 million people impacted by incarceration before the team recognized the critical gap in second-chance employment opportunities.

The Role: Beyond Traditional Design

This is not a traditional product design role. Emerge Career describes it as a Founding Design Engineer position, even three years into their journey, for two key reasons: you'll be their very first engineer joining their co-founder who built the entire platform solo, and their growth is now outpacing their systems.

What You'll Actually Do

Talking to students — a lot. Your week starts and ends with users. You'll build real relationships with students, understanding why someone almost quit, what message made them log back in, what screen confused them at 11pm. These conversations are your primary design tool.

Prototyping at the speed of conversation. You hear a problem on a call Tuesday. By Wednesday you have something testable — a coded prototype, a functional hack, a Figma flow wired to real data. By Thursday a student is using it. By Friday you know if it worked. That's the cycle. Repeat.

Shipping real product, not just designs. You'll work in their React and TypeScript codebase — or use AI tools like Cursor and Claude Code to get there. The goal isn't to become a full-time engineer. The goal is to never let "it hasn't been built yet" slow down learning.

Designing the moments that keep students going. The hardest design problem here isn't layout or typography. It's commitment. Students are betting months of effort on a future they have to imagine. You'll study where they disengage, what triggers doubt, and what reignites momentum.

Measuring what matters. Polished decks don't matter here. You'll define success metrics for what you ship, track whether completion rates moved, whether more students hit the next milestone, whether the intervention you designed actually intervened.

Who You Are

The ideal candidate designs by building. You don't hand off mockups and wait. You open Cursor, Claude Code, or whatever gets you closest to a real, testable thing fastest. You believe the fastest path to a great design is putting something real in front of a real user and watching what happens.

You are relentlessly scrappy. You prototype in hours, not weeks. You'd rather test an ugly thing that teaches you something than polish a beautiful thing nobody's used yet. You know that at this stage, speed of learning is the only thing that matters.

You refuse to be blocked. When engineering bandwidth isn't there, you don't sit around. You figure it out — a Figma prototype, a coded prototype, a quick hack in the codebase. You treat "waiting for a developer" as a personal failure.

You think in outcomes, not outputs. You don't measure your work in screens delivered. You measure it in whether students finished, whether they came back, whether the thing you shipped actually moved a number that matters.

You talk to users constantly. Not in scheduled quarterly research sprints — in real conversations, every week. You build relationships with students. You know their names, their blockers, their moments of doubt.

You have strong taste but low ego. You have opinions about what good looks like and you'll fight for them. But when the data says you're wrong, you move on fast. You don't fall in love with your work. You fall in love with the problem.

You believe everyone deserves a second chance. You treat everyone with dignity. You know how to meet people exactly where they are — with empathy and compassion.

You work hard. You show up early, stay late, and do what needs to get done — no ego, no excuses. This isn't a 9-to-5. The team puts in 10+ hour days because they care about the mission and each other.

The Interview Process

The process includes an intro chat (15 min), cultural fit conversation & technical screen (60 min), a getting to know you interview (60 min), reference checks with 3-4 people you've worked with, and a paid work trial (2-5 days) onsite with access to internal tools and team collaboration. The work trial pays $500 per day with all travel expenses covered.

Why This Matters

Emerge Career is tackling two systemic issues: recidivism fueled by post-incarceration unemployment and poverty, and labor shortages in key industries. Over 60% of formerly incarcerated people remain unemployed a year after incarceration, seeking work but not finding it. The reality is shocking — workforce development programs are severely limited inside prison, with only one-third of incarcerated people ever participating.

This role offers the opportunity to build technology that directly impacts lives, with measurable outcomes that prove the model works. If you want to be close to users, own outcomes end to end, and build something that actually matters, this could be the role where you thrive.

The company has already attracted support from notable investors including Alexis Ohanian (776), Michael Seibel, Y Combinator, the Opportunity Fund, and public figures like Diana Taurasi, Deandre Ayton, and Marshawn Lynch. Their programs now serve entire states and cities, with their students' journeys capturing national attention on CBS, NBC, and in The Boston Globe.

This is a rare opportunity to join a mission-driven startup at a critical juncture, where your design decisions will directly impact whether someone gets a second chance at life.