UX Designer

About Buttonwood and PRL

Prometheus Research Labs (PRL) is the team building Buttonwood Bonds, an on-chain market for long-term debt. We’re the first team to build a liquidation-free debt market, unlocking safe DeFi borrowing for the vast majority of users.

  • Money markets have three core components—short-term debt (demand-deposit markets), exchanges, and long-term debt (bonds). DeFi today has exchanges and short-term lending with scale, as evidenced by the size of Uniswap, Compound, and Aave. But long-term lending is still missing.

  • Long-term debt is non-callable debt. This means freedom from margin calls and liquidations. For example, a drop in the value of your home does not trigger the liquidation of your house—rather, only multiple missed payments can bring the house into foreclosure. In contrast, short-term debt can lead to liquidations during times of high volatility.

The Buttonwood Foundation’s mission is to grow both the web3 bond market and a new generation of decentralized finance (DeFi) instruments—including fiat-free stablecoins, yield splitters, and long/short options. Our projects are composed of simple, open contracts—we seek not to build a platform or walled garden, but a set of tools open to all.

The Buttonwood Foundation is backed by True Ventures, Framework Ventures, BlockTower Capital, NfX, Bitfinex/Tether, Mechanism Capital, Bixin, Founders Collective, and numerous DeFi founders (including from Coingecko, Balancer, Cozy, Syndicate, and many more).

About you

You will be our first Design hire. We are looking for a UX designer to create user flows, drive end-to-end designs, and distill financial complexity into beautiful, logical interfaces. You are curious to understand how financial instruments work and excited to improve on what they are capable of doing.

You will participate in every stage of a fast-paced design and build process – from research, journey mapping, user flows, and exploratory design sprints, to wire-framing, prototyping, delivery of high-fidelity designs, and iteration with product and engineering through the development process.

You will play a critical role in bringing Buttonwood’s lending markets to the world. Come build the bond market with us!

Responsibilities

  • Own all design initiatives and processes
  • Design interfaces for complex DeFi applications
  • Gather and distill feedback from customers and partners into actionable updates
  • Work with the engineering team to continuously iterate on product design

Job Requirements (in order of importance)

  • Ability to work through ambiguity and multiple priorities; self-motivated, directed, and independent
  • Understanding of DeFi concepts
  • Proven ability to generate logical interfaces for complex systems
  • A portfolio demonstrating breadth, creativity, and proven experience using Sketch or Figma
  • Believer in the “Less is more” design methodology
  • Must be willing to overlap with Pacific Time Zone
  • Previous experience at a high-growth startup preferred
  • Bachelor's degree in design, user experience, or related field preferred

Benefits

  • Competitive Salary (TBD based on experience)
  • Token Incentive Plan (TBD based on experience)
  • Comprehensive insurance, flexible hours, unlimited vacation
  • Fully remote (if desired)

How to apply

Please send an email to matthew @ prl.one with 100% of the following if you wish to be considered for this role:

  1. Resume / CV
  2. Design Portfolio (Behance or equivalent)
  3. LinkedIn or Twitter URL
  4. A short response to the following questions:
    • When would you be ready to start?
    • What is your experience with Web3 and/or DeFi?
    • What is your experience with traditional FinTech applications?
    • What is your experience with working with remote development teams?
    • Would you consider yourself deadline oriented?
    • What is your favorite Web3 protocol or Fintech application and why?
    • Would you be interested in relocating to California?
    • Would you be able to overlap with Pacific hours (PST)?

We look forward to hearing from you!