UX Designer

About Kenn

Kenn is a venture-backed startup building next-generation systems to power the future of agentic work. Wes McKinney, Phillip Cloud, and Marius van Niekerk founded it in 2026. Before Kenn, Wes created pandas and co-created Apache Arrow.

kenn.io · github.com/kenn-io

The role

Kenn is hiring a senior UX Designer to own the visual and interaction design of everything we build. A small team built our products quickly, and each one grew its own look. We have done most of the UI work ourselves so far, and we enjoy it. Someone with deep design expertise will take it much further.

You will decide how our products look and feel.

What you will do

Some of the things you might work on:

• How a coding-agent session reads in AgentsView, from the transcript to the search results and the cost reports.
• How roborev presents its queue of review findings to a developer.
• How our command-line tools, such as kata and kwt, lay out help text, tables, and errors.
• The look of kenn.io and the sites for each product.

You decide what to keep, what to improve, and what to start over.

What you will build

In your first month or two, you will ship a shared design system for visual and interaction design, written down so the team and its coding agents can apply it. By about six months, every Kenn product will follow it, and you will probably have hired one more person to help you. After that, the design system grows with every product we add.

Who we are looking for

• Deep design experience. You have a strong sense of design and have applied it to real products.
• Ships code. You implement your own designs, and you would rather ship something and fix it than polish it for another week. Designing in a tool like Figma and handing the work to engineers does not fit this job.
• A portfolio of shipped work. We want to see things you designed and built that people use.
• All in on AI tools, and realistic about them. You use coding agents heavily and are bullish on what they can do. You also know where they fall short.
• Strong opinions, loosely held. You know what good design needs, act on it, and change your mind when the evidence says to.

We care more about your design judgment and the work you have shipped than about any particular framework or language.

Why join

Most of what agentic software should look like has not been invented yet. The field changes fast, and we expect new ways of designing software to come out of it. We want someone adaptable who is excited by those open problems. Your design judgment will shape how Kenn's products look and how people use them, and you will see your work in every product we ship.