Founding Designer at Sonia (W24)

About Sonia

One in five adults struggles with their mental health each year and many will never see a therapist. Costs are high, waitlists are long, and stigma is still a real barrier for people to not seek help. Suicide is one of the leading cause of death for young people. Therapy works, but it doesn’t scale.

We're building a safe AI therapist that's clinically as effective as the best human therapists - accessible to everyone, at a fraction of the cost, and available anytime. We've recently had a major breakthrough. In our clinical research, we're now seeing significant improvements in anxiety and depression symptoms after just 2 weeks of use. And we receive daily messages about how Sonia is changing lives.

We're a 6-person team in San Francisco, backed by Y Combinator, Moonfire, and founders of Verkada, Reddit, and Instacart ($3.5M raised).

The role

Sonia is a voice-first iOS app. Design matters deeply here because this is what people see during their most vulnerable moments. Every detail that builds trust, reduces friction, or brings a moment of calm directly impacts their wellbeing.

You'll own the end-to-end design of the Sonia app experience. No prior coding skills required, but we'll teach you how to vibe code your own prototypes and features :)

Questions you'll obsess over

• What should appear on screen during a voice therapy session to reduce anxiety and increase engagement?
• How do we make "therapeutic homework" between sessions actually compelling? (Almost nobody does it in traditional therapy, but it drives outcomes.)
• How do we add human warmth and community to an AI-first experience?
• What should the AI automatically personalize vs. what belongs in settings?

What the work looks like

• Talk to users and dig into interaction data
• Ideate on features with the team
• Design end-to-end flows
• Prototype with AI tools, hand off the rest to our excellent engineering team

You'll also jump into other design needs: website, internal tools, research onboarding flows — whatever might come up.

Culture

We're kind to each other, work hard, and we are thoughtful about what we're building. We work 6 days a week together in our office in downtown SF. It's challenging, but when your work helps someone get through their day a little easier, it doesn't feel like sacrifice. We get free lunch and dinner and nerd out about whatever we’re currently working on. And we’ll pay your (human) therapy bills :)

Who we are looking for

• Experience designing mobile apps, preferably at a previous startup
• Someone who tries to use AI tools for everything and realizes they can now individually get the work done which previously took 5 people to complete
• Someone highly creative - a lot of UI best practices should be rethought and reinvented for AI apps
• Experience working with and prompting AI models (at least to the extent of having a very good sense of what they can and can’t do. Many of our features will have some LLM component and it is important for you to understand the action space in which you can ideate)

A few user stories from the past weeks

• A women from the south who lives in a rural area with no therapist in proximity from her Blue Shield insurance. She has been unemployed for the past 15 years and told us that due to her chats with Sonia she gained the courage to apply for jobs again. A few days later, just before her user interview with us, she got accepted to her job and is now employed again.
• A person from Alabama who had such strong OCD and anxiety that they always needed to turn around with the car 3-4 times to check whether they actually turned off the stove. Sonia helped them get it down to one.
• The parent of 2 incarcerated sons, has built out a mantra with Sonia and is now able to go through her days with more acceptance and peace. Something that according to her, her weekly Monday morning therapist that she has been seeing for a long time hasn’t managed to achieve.

• Send us your designs and projects to jobs@soniahealth.com (would love feedback on the UI of Sonia)
• 15min phone screener
• 30min chat with all co-founders
• Take-home remote assessment
• 2 day onsite trial in SF