The person who makes Intelligent Workspaces feel like nothing else.

About Etain

We're building a fully customizable AI native workspace platform that allows organizations, or individuals, to work the way they think. Think of it as a workspace that adapts to how you actually work.

We're not just building another chatbot or document viewer. We're solving real problems around workspace customization, intelligent document understanding, workflow automation, and knowledge extraction in high-stakes environments where correctness matters.

Intelligent Workspaces is built for knowledge workers — and we're going to market through legal, one of the most demanding knowledge environments in the world. When you open a workspace, everything you need is already there: the right documents, the relevant context, the people involved, the process you're following. It connects the dots you currently connect manually.

The Role

Knowledge workers are drowning in information and starving for clarity. The expertise that matters most — the judgment, the pattern recognition, the hard-won understanding built over years — lives in people's heads and disappears when they're not in the room.

Intelligent Workspaces changes that — an environment where your intelligence is amplified, not replaced. Where you feel on top of everything. The zen in the chaos. The superpower feeling. Something the world hasn't seen before.

That experience has to be designed. Someone has to hold that vision and make every detail serve it.

That's this role.

What You'll Own

The Product's Aesthetic Identity

• Define and own the visual and interaction language of Etain — not just a style guide, but a living point of view
• Push beyond functional adequacy toward experiences that are genuinely beautiful, considered, and distinctive
• Build the design DNA that makes every screen, animation, and micro-interaction feel coherent and intentional

The Feeling of Intelligence

• Solve the hardest UX problem in AI: making a system that knows a lot feel calm, not overwhelming
• Design how the knowledge graph surfaces — how context appears, how connections reveal themselves, how AI contributions feel trustworthy rather than intrusive
• Create the visual metaphors and interaction patterns that make abstract intelligence feel tangible

Movement & Moment

• Own the motion design language — transitions, animations, and micro-interactions that make the product feel alive without feeling busy
• Define the moments that matter: onboarding, first-use delight, the satisfaction of a complex task completed
• Make mundane interactions feel good. The scroll. The hover. The save.

Creative Direction Across All Touchpoints

• Extend the aesthetic vision beyond the product to marketing materials, sales leave-behinds, demos, and pitch decks
• Be the taste arbiter — the person who looks at any Etain artifact and knows whether it's right
• Collaborate with CPO, CTO, and CEO to ensure the product narrative and product experience tell the same story

What We're Looking For

Required

Vision Over Process

• You have a strong aesthetic point of view and the conviction to defend it
• You believe clarity is a design value — that the absence of mess is a creative achievement, not a default
• You think in systems but feel in details — and you know the difference between clean and empty

Taste as a Skill

• You've developed a refined sense of what works and what doesn't across design, art, architecture, or adjacent creative fields
• You know the difference between trendy and timeless, and you care about the difference
• You're as likely to reference Dieter Rams or Tadao Ando as Dribbble

Maker Instincts

• You create, not just critique — you can produce work, not only direct it
• Proficiency in Figma, but you think beyond Figma's defaults
• Some understanding of what's technically possible (frontend, motion, CSS) — enough to dream within real constraints

Collaboration Without Compromise

• You can bring engineers and product managers on a creative journey without losing the thread
• You know when to push and when to adapt — and you push more than you adapt
• You give and receive feedback with generosity and precision

Nice to Have

What Makes This Different

You Won't Be a Service Function

Design isn't an afterthought here. The product's distinctiveness is a strategic asset. Your work will directly influence whether customers choose us over better-funded competitors.

The Problem Is Genuinely Hard

We're making tacit knowledge concrete. The experience, judgment, and institutional memory that usually live in people's heads or disappear when someone leaves — we're capturing it, structuring it, and making it available. No one has designed that well yet. You'll be the first.

Rare Creative Latitude

We're early enough that you'll define the aesthetic language, not inherit it. Your decisions will compound — the choices you make now will shape how the product looks and feels for years.

People Who Care

Our CPO spent a decade as a practising lawyer before building this product. Our CTO brings architectural rigor to the codebase. We are people who care deeply about the quality of what we make. You'll fit right in.

Our Culture

• Small team, high trust. We hire adults and treat them like it.
• We're established — not a garage operation, not month-to-month.
• Great office in Oslo: lunch, good equipment, the fridge never empties.
• We ship. Decisions get made. Things change fast.
• We are building something we believe in. That matters to us. It should matter to you.

If you have a talent for making things that feel inevitable in retrospect — apply.