Our sole focus is to build a safe AI therapist clinically as effective as the 99th percentile human therapist and to make mental health support accessible to anyone. After 12 months of exploring all sorts of architectures, form factors, and approaches, we have recently had a major breakthrough. As of a few weeks ago, we now have a version with which we are starting to see very significant clinical outcomes in the form of GAD-7 (anxiety score) reductions even just after 2 weeks of using Sonia. We are receiving messages daily of how it’s changing people’s lives. We’re just at the start and there is still so much to do and build. Now it’s time to move fast and scale the team.

About Sonia

Our sole focus is to build a safe AI therapist clinically as effective as the 99th percentile human therapist and to make mental health support accessible to anyone. After 12 months of exploring all sorts of architectures, form factors, and approaches, we have recently had a major breakthrough. As of a few weeks ago, we now have a version with which we are starting to see very significant clinical outcomes in the form of GAD-7 (anxiety score) reductions even just after 2 weeks of using Sonia. We are receiving messages daily of how it’s changing people’s lives. We’re just at the start and there is still so much to do and build. Now it’s time to move fast and scale the team.

We are currently a 5 person team based in San Francisco and have raised $3.5m from top investors including Y Combinator, Moonfire, and the founders of Verkada, Reddit, and Instacart.

The Role

Sonia exists in the form of a SwiftUI mobile app. We are convinced design is incredibly important for a product like ours. Think about it - it’s what humans will see and interact with during their most emotional moments. Every smile we can put on their face, every cognitive load we can reduce, every way we can foster trust, and every distraction or annoyance we avoid, can have a significant impact on their wellbeing and thus our success.

While most of our team’s capacity is of course spent on the AI and engineering work to build the actual AI therapy session, we believe that the UI/UX both during the session and outside (e.g. reviewing sessions, doing personalized exercises) has a crucial impact on the final product.

Some questions you will obsess about in your first months:

• What is the most effective way to leverage the phone screen throughout a voice conversation? What can we show on that screen to reduce stress, increase clinical efficacy, enhance engagement, etc?
• How can we personalize and adjust the UI/UX for a specific person? What parts should just be on a settings page and what should the AI automatically adjust based on what we learn from their conversations? For example, when someone gets interrupted by the AI multiple times, we could show a popup asking them whether they want slower responses, or we could just update an endpointing variable automatically via an LLM.
• What is the best possible in-between session experience? Almost nobody completes their homework in traditional human therapy (although it is very important and correlated with outcomes). How can we make it more engaging while still effective?
• How can we add a human touch and sense of community to an AI-first experience? People really value knowing they are not the only ones going through something.

Clearly at our team size it doesn’t make sense to have someone solely focused on design. You will essentially be a blend of a product manager, designer, and frontend engineer. You will have end-to-end ownership in helping us figure out what to build, how it should feel/look, and then also support us on the implementation.

Here is a typical workflow:

• Talk to users (we call them clients) and analyze interaction data from the app
• Work with us to come up with ideas of what features to tweak, rethink, or add
• Map out and design the end-to-end UI/UX
• Prototype and make minor SwiftUI edits yourself, and hand-off the rest

Of course, not every day will be the same and there are many other areas where we are looking for design-adjacent support. E.g., we need a new website soon, have a lot of incredibly messy internal tooling, need to build onboarding flows for research participants, and much more. On some days, something comes up that is just so important that every single one of us jumps on it and makes sure it gets done asap.

It will definitely not get boring and you need to get your hands dirty - but the main responsibility is the look and feel of the Sonia mobile app.

Culture

We care about three things - kindness, hard work and intelligence. We only want people who genuinely are interested (ideally obsessed) about making the world a happier place and are ready to work (very) hard to make people smile at scale. For the most part, we work 6-7 days a week in person in SF and are at the office 8-8 on weekdays. It will be intense, but we have a lot of fun and are basically all best friends. And trust me — being on a user interview where someone is crying telling you how your software changed their life and is the reason they have a job again — is the most rewarding thing ever and makes it all worth it. Additionally, you can count on me personally doing everything I possibly can to make you happy, successful and fulfilled at Sonia.

Who We Are Looking For

• A kind, hardworking and intelligent person :)
• Experience designing mobile apps, preferably at a previous startup
• Experience working with SwiftUI
• Your own side projects designed and built end-to-end (send them to me!)
• 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 - I think a lot of UI best practices should be rethought and reinvented for voice 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)
• Having been involved in some project, organization, charity or other work that directly or indirectly was focused on making people happier

A Few Client Stories from the past Weeks

• 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.
• 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 lady who had spammed my personal phone number about how good Sonia is and how she is trying to get her fiancé to use the app because she thinks it will save their marriage. Turns out he doesn’t have an iPhone so we bought him one to try it out.
• The parent of 2 criminal 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.