The Studio is part of Utopia Capital’s integrated venture platform — combining AI-native venture building, capital, and shared infrastructure to help founders build faster and smarter. Every role here directly contributes to launching and scaling AI-native companies across the Global South, from idea to Series A.

About The Studio

The Studio is an AI-native venture builder for the Global South, purpose-built to transform high-barrier problems into scalable, investable companies.

Partnering with domain experts & high-agency founders from concept to Series A, it both builds new ventures and re-engineers existing ones for AI-driven growth.

Powered by UTOPIA OS — a modular, adaptive stack tailored to each venture — it compresses the path from concept to Series A to under 24 months.

About the Role

You'll be Utopia's first Design Lead — a hands-on product design leader who's AI-native but human-centered. You'll create the design practices and principles that power the Utopia OS platform and help our Entrepreneurs-in-Residence (EIRs) and ventures turn insider insight into usable, trustworthy AI products.

You'll balance AI tools (for speed), AI fluency (designing for probabilistic and agentic systems), and human advantage (taste, judgment, narrative) to deliver products that users actually adopt and investors believe in.

You will form a product trio with the Rapid Prototyping Engineer and the Platform & Infrastructure Engineer to drive continuous discovery and delivery.

Reports to: Studio Directors
Growth path: Head of Design / Chief Design Officer

Responsibilities

Venture Design & Founder Collaboration

• Partner with EIR pods from problem framing through to pilot: research, journey mapping, information architecture, flows, wireframes, high-fidelity UX

• Design for AI interactions (retrieval, agents, evaluations, fail-safes), turning uncertain model behavior into clear, reliable UX

• Run rapid testing loops with real users and translate findings into product decisions that accelerate pilots and spin-outs

• Use analytics and behavioral data to validate design choices and guide iteration

Design System: Utopia OS

• Build the Utopia OS Design System — components, patterns, tokens, and AI-UX guidelines (prompt patterns, agent handoffs, uncertainty states) that all ventures can use

• Create reusable UI modules for common Studio needs: auth, dashboards, data explorers, workflow builders. This cuts build time across ventures

AI-Native Craft & Design Operations

• Establish an AI-augmented design workflow (research synthesis, wireframing, content, asset generation) while keeping human judgment in the loop

• Leverage the latest AI-native tools (Cursor, Figma MCP, rapid prototyping environments) to design, iterate, and ship efficiently

• Coach founders and product engineers on prompt-as-design, evaluation thinking, and responsible AI UX patterns

• Set lightweight design QA, accessibility, and privacy standards suitable for enterprise pilots in our regions

• As part of a small, high-trust team, you’ll also help lay early foundations for ResearchOps and Design System governance — coordinating user sessions, keeping insights reusable across ventures, and ensuring design components evolve with each product cycle.

• These systems will start scrappy and manual, but are meant to scale as Utopia’s venture portfolio grows.

Collaboration across the Utopia Platform’s teams

• Work with the Marketing Lead on venture launch assets and product narratives when design credibility is critical (screens, visuals, product shots)

• Support the creation of marketing and brand assets to ensure design coherence across product and communication touchpoints

• Partner with leadership to prioritize design resources across co-build and value-add tracks, and codify learnings back into Utopia OS

• Co-lead discovery rituals with the product trio (weekly user sessions, prototype reviews, and decision records) to keep design, engineering, and venture goals aligned.

• We operate as a compact, AI-native core team — covering product, design, and engineering end-to-end.

• Each of us contributes to early foundations in areas like evaluation, data, research, and security, ensuring the platform scales responsibly without added layers or headcount.

Impact & Success Metrics

• Faster venture cycles: Your design system and patterns reduce time from concept to pilot, contributing to our KPIs on concepts developed and proofs-of-concept.

• Higher spin-out quality: Pilots ship with clear, credible UX and safety patterns — raising conversion to spin-outs.

• Scalable value-add: Reusable UX modules help both Middle East and non-Middle East companies receiving value-added services achieve adoption more quickly.

• You raise the design bar: Your work becomes a benchmark for high-craft, AI-native design across ventures.

Experience & Skills

• 5+ years in product/UX design with early-stage companies (start-ups or scale-ups). Strong portfolio of shipped features and end-to-end ownership. Comfortable running user research — from planning and interviews to synthesis and insight generation.

• You've designed with LLMs/agents (prompt strategies, guardrails, evaluation loops) and understand probabilistic UX

• You can build design systems, interaction patterns, and deliver visual polish

• You are comfortable working with engineers on data-heavy products. You understand analytics and experimentation

• You can turn complexity into clear narratives for users, founders, and partners

• You’ve shipped complex, high-quality software products across platforms, web, mobile, and AI-first interfaces.

• You balance speed with precision, knowing when to move fast and when to refine.

• You understand engineering well enough to prototype ideas using Cursor, Figma MCP, or lightweight code tools.

• You have strong taste, an eye for clarity, flow, and finish that shows in your work.

• You operate with ownership and autonomy, seeing what needs to be done and doing it.

Mindset & Values

• Outcome over output: You measure design by adoption, pilot success, and learning velocity.

• Human-in-the-loop: AI accelerates you, but taste and judgment remain the moat.

• Builder's bias: You thrive with small teams, high agency, and shipping fast with responsible guardrails.

• Regional empathy: You're curious about ventures, innovation and nuances across the GCC, Southeast Asia, and Africa.

Why This Role Exists

You'll define how AI-native products feel across an entire venture platform — shaping the design language of companies built on Utopia OS and helping Doha become a launchpad for globally relevant innovation. We really care about design and see it becoming a core differentiator, especially from companies in the Global South.

This role exists because as building with AI gets easier, the real differentiation lies in the last 25%. We need someone who raises the bar on interaction and visual design, brings precision and creativity, and drives execution excellence. This is a hands-on product design role for someone who builds, experiments, and ships, not just strategizes.

What You Can Expect

• Meaningful Impact: Your work directly contributes to building the core infrastructure behind a new generation of ventures - enabling equitable, AI-native innovation across the Global South.

• Collaborative Culture: We thrive on openness, curiosity, and collective intelligence. Everyone has a voice, and decisions are made transparently.

• Growth Mindset: From AI learning and use budgets to mentorship, we invest in your development and help you grow beyond your comfort zone.

• Competitive Rewards: Tax-free compensation, private health, travel insurance and flexible hybrid setup.

• Work-Life Integration: Office lunches twice a week, great snacks, and team meetups that keep energy and connection high.

• Global Exposure: Occasional travel across Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East for meaningful, on-ground collaboration with venture teams.

• Inclusive by Design: We celebrate diversity and are committed to building an environment where everyone belongs.

Who This Role Isn’t Right For

If you prefer strategy or research over building, or rely on heavy structure, this isn’t the right fit. We move fast, work hands-on, and expect a deep level of craft in everything shipped.

If you prefer working on just 1 product or 1 project, this isn’t the right fit for you. We are building a platform called Utopia OS, that is looking to help founders then build companies on top of, so you will be building with the founders too.

If you are not open to the use of AI in design and development, we care about human taste and judgement but at the same time are looking to make that element scalable.

The Utopia Platform Advantage

The Studio is part of Utopia Capital’s integrated venture platform designed to solve the biggest friction points in emerging market venture creation.

Most founders face a broken journey: they struggle to build with limited resources, chase capital across disconnected investors, and lack the infrastructure to scale across regions. We've built a different system.

The Studio co-builds ventures with domain experts using AI-native infrastructure, compressing the path from concept to product. The Radical Fund and A-typical Ventures provide fast, aligned capital from pre-seed through Series A, removing fundraising friction at every stage. And Utopia OS — our shared technical backbone — gives every venture access to the same tools, data systems, and regional networks that would normally take years and millions to build.

This means founders can focus on solving real problems while we handle the build infrastructure, capital coordination, and cross-regional expansion. It's a compounding system: each venture we build makes the next one faster, smarter, and more capital-efficient. That's the platform advantage that you will be part of and contribute to, purpose-built for the complexity of the Global South.

We believe innovation should be inclusive and globally distributed. Our team is built on openness, curiosity, and collaboration — with people from across the GCC, Africa, and Southeast Asia working together to build meaningful ventures.

All roles are based in Doha, Qatar, with flexible hybrid options and global travel opportunities. We welcome talent from every background to join us in shaping the future of AI-native innovation.

Compensation Range: $70K - $100K