The 100 List: Eleven Roles, Three New — Route Figma and Handshake Before Monday

Board health — September 26

Eleven qualifying roles, three of them new since the September 19 scan. Figma posted a Director, Product Design for its AI & Context pillar four days ago. Handshake added a third design seat, Tasking, on September 23. DoorDash is back with a Staff PD, New Bets posting from two days ago. Seven roles retired on signal decay. The named-target scan produced nothing inside the 14-day window: Anthropic, OpenAI, Stripe, Suno, Abridge, Ramp, Headway, Amplitude, Atlassian, Adobe. Anthropic has Product Designer roles open, none at Staff or above.

Portfolio reachability

The Agentic Labs apps (Brand Pulse, Retail Velocity, Carrier IQ) are live at their own subdomains and are not linked from the junochen.com homepage. Any outreach that references them needs the direct URL.

Act: contact routes open now

Four roles clear Act with postings still inside their hot windows. Figma and the Handshake Tasking seat are new; Handshake Autonomous Recruiting and Webflow carry over from September 19. Handshake is standing up a multi-seat AI design org (three live design postings plus a concurrent VP Product search), so if you go after both Staff seats, decide first which one your evidence fits: Tasking is exception triage, Autonomous Recruiting is delegation and trust. The Opportunity Brief should cover both. Route Figma and Handshake Tasking to Battlecards before Monday.

1. ★ NEW — Figma. Browser-based interface design and prototyping, now selling AI credits into the same accounts. Director, Product Design — AI & Context. Posted September 22 (4 days).

Stage / Size / Capital: Public. Q2 2026 revenue $370.1M, up 48% YoY. 80% of customers above $10K ARR use AI credits weekly.
Offices: San Francisco, New York, US-remote eligible.
Value chain: Midstream platform. Figma sits between the model providers above it and the product teams below, and the Context Platform pillar spans Design Systems, Code, MCP (the protocol AI clients use to pull structured context), CMS, and Community. Scope is wide and crosses several teams.
Best at: Deciding how design teams work together. The AI & Context pillar is where Figma settles how models read and write design context, and the MCP layer is unsettled territory for everyone in it.
Signals: Posting is four days old. AI credit consumption now appears in the earnings narrative, which means it is being run as a business line.
Tier: Growth-stage platform — Tier Playbook: Read Growth-stage platform playbook before outreach.
Rubric scores: Company 10/12 — AI centrality 2, Stage/equity 2, Design influence 3, Trajectory 3. Role 12/15 — Total comp 3 ($290K–$376K cash plus equity), Scope 3, Craft depth 2 (management-heavy: multi-team group, people management explicit), AI exposure 2 (MCP and context work sits adjacent to the core AI product), Portfolio value 2.
Portfolio match: The pillar's hard problem is coordinating design across five surfaces where one question decides the outcome — do users accept AI-generated context or route around it. Alibaba is the closest parallel in the portfolio: three cross-functional surfaces (homepage, search, PDP), a trust problem at the moment a buyer commits to a large cross-border order, and +20% transactions showing the platform metric actually moved. That combination — multi-surface trust architecture with a platform-level conversion outcome — is hard to find on an AI-design résumé.
Verdict: Act. Company 10, Role 12. Signal four days old. Route to Battlecard. Craft depth scores 2, so treat this as a management role with multiple teams under it. If player-coach is a requirement rather than a preference for you, test the "hands-on execution" language in the first conversation.

2. ★ NEW — Handshake. Recruiting marketplace connecting students with employers, now building an AI product line on top of it. Staff Product Designer, Handshake AI (Tasking). Posted September 23 (3 days). The seat owns the internal tasking platform that Quality, Coding, RLE (reinforcement-learning environments), Fellow Experience, operations research, pilots, and production design all run through.

Stage / Size / Capital: Series F, $3.5B at last reported valuation (Jan 2022). Pre-IPO with meaningful equity.
Offices: San Francisco, hybrid.
Value chain: Downstream application with an infrastructure wrinkle. The tasking platform is internal, and it sets the quality and throughput ceiling for everything the AI product ships.
Best at: Staffing the AI line with design seats that own a problem end to end. The concurrent VP Product search and five open design requisitions say this is a buildout with headcount behind it.
Signals: Three design seats live (Tasking, Autonomous Recruiting, Student Experience) plus Senior PD II and Growth. Two older Staff requisitions, operator-independence and Founding Staff Enterprise, have dropped out of the active feed; Tasking may have absorbed parts of them.
Tier: AI-native — Tier Playbook: Read AI-native playbook before outreach.
Rubric scores: Company 11/12 — AI centrality 3, Stage/equity 2, Design influence 3, Trajectory 3. Role 14/15 — Total comp 2 ($225K–$250K plus equity), Scope 3, Craft depth 3, AI exposure 3, Portfolio value 3.
Portfolio match: The design problem inside Tasking is exception-first triage — human reviewers deciding which AI outputs need intervention across Quality, Coding, and Fellow Experience. Thermo Fisher is the direct proof: 197 orders moving through the system and the design job was surfacing the three that needed attention, across 6 pharma partners and 9 sites. She shipped exception triage in production across a regulated multi-partner environment where a wrong batch meant a compliance event.
Verdict: Act. Company 11, Role 14. Signal three days old. The Opportunity Brief owns the engagement package; see the Issue 11 Handshake brief for account context.

3. Handshake. Staff Product Designer, Autonomous Recruiting. Posted September 17 (9 days). Continuing from the September 19 board. Blank-slate AI recruiting product with conversational AI and agentic automation at the center.

Stage / Size / Capital: Same as entry #2.
Offices: San Francisco, hybrid.
Tier: AI-native — Tier Playbook: Read AI-native playbook before outreach.
Rubric scores: Company 11/12. Role 14/15 — Total comp 2, Scope 3, Craft depth 3, AI exposure 3, Portfolio value 3.
Portfolio match: The product's governing question is when the agent acts and when it escalates, on decisions that affect people's careers. The Trust essay's five handoffs framework addresses that delegation question directly, and Carrier IQ shows agentic workflow automation where wrong outputs — insurance quotes — carry real consequences. Both the delegation framework and a shipped agentic system with real-consequence outputs are in the same portfolio.
Verdict: Act. Company 11, Role 14. Signal nine days old, still hot. The two-seat question is in the cluster note above.

4. Webflow. Visual site builder and CMS; the September 2 Source launch pushes it into agent-authored content. Staff Product Designer, Agentic CMS. Posted approximately September 18 (8 days). Continuing.

Stage / Size / Capital: Private, growth-stage. Series C, $120M+ raised.
Offices: San Francisco, US-remote eligible.
Value chain: Midstream platform. The CMS layer is where humans and agents coauthor, govern, and publish structured content.
Best at: Making complex web development accessible to people who don't write code. Source extends that into governance for content that agents draft and humans approve.
Signals: Still live at roughly eight days. The Opportunity Brief from Issue 12 covers the account moment and the proof mapping.
Tier: Growth-stage platform — Tier Playbook: Read Growth-stage platform playbook before outreach.
Rubric scores: Company 10/12 — AI centrality 2, Stage/equity 3, Design influence 3, Trajectory 3. Role 14/15 — Total comp 2, Scope 3, Craft depth 3, AI exposure 3, Portfolio value 3.
Portfolio match: The mandate comes down to what a human reviewing agent-generated content needs to see, approve, or override. Brand Pulse was built around that question, and the Trust essay supplies the handoff architecture underneath it. She built the oversight system solo. The Opportunity Brief has the full mapping.
Verdict: Act. Company 10, Role 14. Preparation is already done in the Issue 12 Opportunity Brief. Execute.

Gates: resolve before investing preparation time

Two roles score well and carry qualification boundaries the published portfolio cannot clear. Same action on both: find out whether the gate is a hard screen or a preference before spending any preparation time. Five minutes with a recruiter costs less than a Battlecard for a role that screens you out on page one.

5. Comfy. Open-source workflow tool (ComfyUI) for building and running generative AI pipelines. Sr./Staff Product Designer, Developer Platform. Continuing.

Stage / Size / Capital: Pre-IPO, early-stage, growing quickly in the AI tooling layer.
Offices: San Francisco.
Value chain: Midstream tooling, between the models and the applications built on them. The developer platform — console, onboarding, API, billing — is the commercial surface of the open-source project.
Best at: Making complex AI pipelines composable and visual.
Signals: Posting remains live. No status change.
Tier: AI-native — Tier Playbook: Read AI-native playbook before outreach, after the gate resolves.
Rubric scores: Company 11/12 — AI centrality 3, Stage/equity 3, Design influence 2, Trajectory 3. Role 12/15 — Total comp 2, Scope 2, Craft depth 3, AI exposure 3, Portfolio value 2.
Gate: The posting reads "Build what you design. Write the frontend code for your features and submit the PRs." That is a core responsibility, not a nice-to-have. The published portfolio does not establish production front-end authorship. You either have this credential or you don't, and no artifact substitutes for it.
Portfolio match (conditional): Carrier IQ, agentic workflow automation for a developer-adjacent audience. The gate supersedes the match.
Verdict: Watch — gate. Company 11, Role 12. Resolve code authorship first. If hard, skip. If the hiring manager would weigh exceptional developer-platform design evidence instead, route to Battlecard with the code gap disclosed upfront.

6. Deepgram. Speech AI platform: transcription, synthesis, and voice agent infrastructure. Staff Product Designer, Conversational AI. Continuing.

Stage / Size / Capital: Pre-IPO, Series C. $130M raised January 2026 at a $1.3B valuation.
Offices: US-remote.
Value chain: Upstream infrastructure. The speech pipeline (ASR to LLM to TTS) is what voice agent applications run on, and the designer shapes how it behaves rather than how it looks.
Best at: Real-time speech at scale. The design surface here is turn-taking, interruption, repair, and confirmation, which has little overlap with visual UI work.
Signals: Posting remains live. No status change.
Tier: AI-native — Tier Playbook: Read AI-native playbook before outreach, after the gate resolves.
Rubric scores: Company 10/12 — AI centrality 3, Stage/equity 3, Design influence 2, Trajectory 2. Role 13/15 — Total comp 2, Scope 2, Craft depth 3, AI exposure 3, Portfolio value 3.
Gate: The posting asks for "deep experience designing conversational behavior for LLM-based voice agents or assistants, not only scripted IVR flows," fluency across the ASR-to-LLM-to-TTS pipeline, and shipped turn-taking and repair patterns. The agentic work in the portfolio is text-based workflow automation. That is a stated boundary, written by someone who has screened for it before.
Portfolio match (conditional): The Trust essay's handoff framework applies to voice agent trust, but the essay does not demonstrate voice-specific interaction design. The gate supersedes the match.
Verdict: Watch — gate. Company 10, Role 13. Ask the recruiter whether text-based agentic workflow experience substitutes or whether shipped voice work is a hard screen. If hard, skip.

Watch: monitor for state change

Five roles clear the rubric without clearing the bar for spending time on them this week. DoorDash is new and thin on AI. The two enterprise entries are past three weeks. Gray Swan scores well but the location question is unresolved. Monitor, don't prepare; the upgrade condition is named on each entry.

7. ★ NEW — DoorDash. Delivery and local commerce marketplace. Staff Product Designer, New Bets, leading design for Meals for Work inside DoorDash for Business: team lunches, catering, recurring meals, grocery benefits, and the workplace-admin side of all of it. Posted September 24 (2 days).

Stage / Size / Capital: Public. Q2 2026 revenue $4.5B, up 36% YoY. Adjusted EBITDA $914M, up 40%.
Offices: San Francisco, Seattle, New York. Hybrid, one to two office days a week.
Value chain: Downstream application. New Bets is the expansion layer where DoorDash tests business lines that aren't yet core.
Signals: Two days old. The posting mentions "production prototypes and code contributions using code editors and LLM tools" — watch whether that functions as a gate or a preference.
Tier: Growth-stage platform — Tier Playbook: Read Growth-stage platform playbook before outreach.
Rubric scores: Company 8/12 — AI centrality 1, Stage/equity 2, Design influence 2, Trajectory 3. Role 10/15 — Total comp 2 ($176.8K–$260K base at I6 plus RSU grants; the base floor sits under the $200K rubric line, but Staff-level grants at DoorDash's scale should carry total comp above it), Scope 2, Craft depth 3, AI exposure 1, Portfolio value 2.
Portfolio match: Meals for Work is a dual-surface problem: employees ordering meals on one side, workplace administrators managing budgets and policy on the other, and the two have to cohere. Allē is the parallel — dual-surface at 30M members with a 3.2× redemption lift showing conversion held across both sides.
Verdict: Watch. Company 8, Role 10. AI exposure is 1 and portfolio value is 2, so this is a strong public-company IC seat that does nothing for the AI-native trajectory. Upgrade to Act only if the AI exposure turns out deeper than the posting reads.

8. Aleph. Financial planning and analysis platform for finance teams. Staff Product Designer. Continuing.

Stage / Size / Capital: Pre-IPO, growth-stage.
Offices: US-remote eligible.
Value chain: Midstream platform, the planning and analysis layer between raw financial data and executive decisions.
Signals: Posting remains live. No recent public signal on funding or product.
Tier: Growth-stage platform — Tier Playbook: Read Growth-stage platform playbook before outreach.
Rubric scores: Company 8/12 — AI centrality 1, Stage/equity 3, Design influence 2, Trajectory 2. Role 10/15 — Total comp 2, Scope 2, Craft depth 3, AI exposure 1, Portfolio value 2.
Portfolio match: FP&A has the same structural shape as pharma supply chain — the design job is surfacing the variance that matters out of hundreds of line items, not rendering the plan that's on track. Thermo Fisher proves the pattern: three orders out of 197 needing attention, across six partners, under regulatory constraint. The portfolio demonstrates the harder part of this problem: the logic for what the dashboard should surface and when.
Verdict: Watch. Company 8, Role 10. Thin AI exposure, incremental portfolio value. Monitor for a funding announcement or an AI product move that would change the centrality score.

9. Salesforce/Slack. Enterprise messaging and collaboration. VP, Product Design, Individual Contributor / Principal Architect. Continuing. Posted approximately September 2–3 (23–24 days).

Stage / Size / Capital: Public, Salesforce subsidiary. San Francisco.
Signals: 23–24 days, now inside the 22–42 day Watch band. VP IC roles at this scale run long fill cycles because leveling is hard to calibrate and internal candidates get evaluated first.
Tier: Enterprise platform — Tier Playbook: Read Enterprise platform playbook before outreach.
Rubric scores: Company 6/12 — AI centrality 1, Stage/equity 1, Design influence 2, Trajectory 2. Role 13/15 — Total comp 3, Scope 3, Craft depth 3 (IC role), AI exposure 2 (Slack AI features, adjacent), Portfolio value 2.
Portfolio match: The seat sets craft direction across a large surface without managing anyone. Alibaba shows platform-level outcomes (+20% transactions, +2.2pt NPS) produced while staying in the work — she ran three cross-functional sprints herself rather than through reports.
Verdict: Watch. Role 13 clears the threshold even at Company 6. Staleness flag at 23–24 days. Limited equity upside, thin AI. Re-verify in a week; retire at six.

10. ServiceNow. Enterprise workflow platform. Director, Product Design, Customer & Partner Experience. Continuing. Posted approximately September 2–3 (23–24 days).

Stage / Size / Capital: Public, $10B+ revenue. Santa Clara and San Diego.
Signals: 23–24 days, inside the 22–42 day Watch band. A separate Sr. Staff PD, Security and Risk Workflow posting is also live and scores below threshold (Company 6, Role 8).
Tier: Enterprise platform — Tier Playbook: Read Enterprise platform playbook before outreach.
Rubric scores: Company 6/12 — AI centrality 1, Stage/equity 1, Design influence 2, Trajectory 2. Role 10/15 — Total comp 3, Scope 2, Craft depth 2, AI exposure 1, Portfolio value 2.
Portfolio match: Customer & Partner Experience means external users working inside enterprise workflows that were designed for internal operators. The Alibaba proof — naming the structural gap (procurement buyers running on consumer-grade UX), building the research case, securing the executive mandate — maps directly to what this seat requires.
Verdict: Watch. Role 10 clears the threshold even at Company 6. Staleness flag at 23–24 days. Thin AI, thin equity. Re-verify in a week; retire at six.

11. Gray Swan AI. AI safety company doing adversarial testing, red-teaming, and model safety evaluation. Staff Product Designer. Continuing. Posted approximately September 1 (25 days).

Stage / Size / Capital: Pre-IPO, early-stage, in a market pulled along by enterprise and regulatory demand.
Offices: Not specified in the posting. Treat geographic eligibility as a gate and confirm SF-area or remote before outreach.
Value chain: Upstream infrastructure, the evaluation layer between model development and deployment. Design scope covers how safety findings and adversarial results reach model developers and enterprise buyers.
Best at: Adversarial evaluation. The design problem is making a safety finding actionable for the person deciding whether to ship a model.
Signals: 25 days, inside the Watch band. AI safety is a narrow pool, which is a reasonable explanation for a longer cycle.
Tier: AI-native — Tier Playbook: Read AI-native playbook before outreach.
Rubric scores: Company 10/12 — AI centrality 3, Stage/equity 3, Design influence 2, Trajectory 2. Role 13/15 — Total comp 2, Scope 2, Craft depth 3, AI exposure 3, Portfolio value 3.
Portfolio match: Gray Swan's users have to decide when to trust a safety evaluation and when to demand deeper adversarial testing. The Trust essay's Watch–Verify–Delegate ladder describes that decision, and Carrier IQ supplies production proof of agentic design where wrong outputs cost something. Having both the framework and the shipped system in one portfolio is uncommon at this level.
Verdict: Watch. Company 10, Role 13. Two open questions: signal age at 25 days and location. Settle location first. If it's SF-eligible and still live at re-verification, upgrade to Act. Retire at 42 days absent a new signal.

Retirements

Seven roles left the board since September 19, all on signal decay. Each returns on the same trigger: a new Director+ or Staff IC product design posting.

Brex — 75 days since the last qualifying signal.
Gusto — 13+ months.
Typeface — 20+ months.
Render — 50 days.
Reddit — 47 days.
Within — 86 days.
DoorDash (prior role) — the earlier posting is retired at 31 days. The new Staff PD, New Bets role posted September 24 brings DoorDash back as entry #7.

Things to follow up on...

Handshake's older requisitions disappeared: The operator-independence and Founding Staff Enterprise roles are no longer in Handshake's active Ashby feed, which means the September 23 Tasking role may have replaced or absorbed them — worth asking Vee directly.
Figma's AI credit adoption: Figma's Q2 2026 earnings reported 80% of $10K+ ARR customers consuming AI credits weekly, which reframes the AI & Context Director role as revenue-critical infrastructure rather than an experimental bet.
Webflow Source just launched: The September 2 limited research preview of Source by Webflow — governed workspaces, approval paths, shared human-agent operating layer — is the product surface the Agentic CMS role will design within, and the 16-day gap between launch and posting suggests urgency.
Within got an Accenture investment: The September 23 Accenture partnership and investment is a genuine company trigger, but the Staff Product Designer posting is 86 days old with no evidence the design search restarted — watch for a new requisition.