Contract Web Designer / Developer — Link Studio

Engagement: Contract, remote Hours: Hourly, capped per project — see Scope & Budget Start: Immediately Contact: Justin Milligan — [email protected]

About Link Studio

Link Studio is a venture studio inside Link Ventures. We co-found AI-native companies from scratch, building teams around technical talent out of MIT, Harvard, and Princeton. We move fast, ship early, and iterate in public.

Because we're constantly spinning up new ventures and programs, we're constantly standing up new web properties. We want a designer we can call on repeatedly rather than starting from zero each time.

This posting is the first project in what we intend to be an ongoing relationship. Two sites, defined scope, real budget. If the work is good, there is a steady stream of it behind this.

What we're looking for

A designer who codes. Not a developer who can nudge CSS, and not a designer who hands off a Figma file and disappears.

You should be the person who can look at a bare-bones site, form a strong opinion about what it should feel like, and then go build that thing. The bar here is taste and judgment — we're hiring you for what you'd do differently, not for your ability to execute a spec we hand you.

Required

• A portfolio of sites you designed and shipped. Live URLs, not mockups.
• Strong visual and typographic instincts. Editorial sensibility over template-y SaaS-landing-page conventions.
• Comfortable in a modern React/Next.js + Tailwind codebase, and equally comfortable in hand-written HTML/CSS/JS when a project doesn't need a framework.
• Git fluency. You'll work in our repos on branches and open PRs.
• Deploys to Vercel.
• Able to work from a rough brief and a conversation. Our specs will not be complete, and we'd rather you propose than wait.

Nice to have

• Copywriting chops. Good web design is mostly deciding what the words say.
• Brand identity work — we have logos and no real system behind them.
• Experience designing for technical/research audiences (ML, deep tech).
• Motion and interaction design used with restraint.
• Light backend: forms, serverless functions, headless CMS, content pipelines.

Not a fit if you need fully specified requirements, work exclusively in Figma, or your portfolio is mostly WordPress/Squarespace themes.

Scope & Budget

Two projects. We'd like the same person on both, but you can bid on either.

Project 1 — Link Launchpad (linklaunchpad.org)

Link Launchpad is a three-week AI startup sprint for student founders, run at One Kendall Square in Cambridge, January 4–22, 2027. Roughly 10–12 teams, $5K per team, housing, catered lunches, a speaker series, and demo days.

The site currently exists but is thin. There's a working application flow and the skeleton of the content (program schedule, team, speakers, timeline). What it lacks is a point of view.

The job: make it something a talented student founder sees and immediately wants to be part of. Real design direction, real hierarchy, real copy. The application flow should be frictionless and feel like the front door to something selective and well-run.

• Stack: static HTML/CSS/JS on Vercel. No framework, no build step. Application form posts to a Vercel serverless function.
• Cap: 4 hours
• Timeline: first pass within two weeks of start. This is the more time-sensitive of the two — we're recruiting for a January program.

Project 2 — QuanTM (quantm.ai)

QuanTM is a research venture working on extreme model quantization

The live site today is an outdated blog, but we want to shift it to a company page

The job: turn it into a credible research hub — the kind of site where a serious ML researcher lands, believes the work, and wants to contribute. We have a large volume of research results to publish, so content architecture matters as much as visual design: how results, posts, and leaderboards are organized, templated, and added to over time.

• Stack: Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS 4, App Router, deployed on Vercel.
• Cap: 4 hours for the redesign. A possible follow-on scope (separately quoted) covers automated content ingestion from Box and/or GitHub so the research library populates without manual work.
• Timeline: flexible, starting after Launchpad or in parallel.

Rate: $50/hr

How we'll work

• You get read/write access to the relevant GitHub repos. Branches and PRs; Justin reviews and merges.
• Kickoff call to walk through both properties, the audiences, and what we think good looks like. Then async — Slack or email — with a short check-in weekly.
• We'll be responsive on decisions. If you're blocked on an answer for more than a day, escalate.
• Design direction on both sites is genuinely open. Push back on us.