Software Engineer, Claude Design

Responsibilities

• Build and ship Claude Design's core surfaces (the design canvas, real-time editing, inline comments, and the live adjustment controls Claude generates), shipping early and often to maximize learning
• Collaborate closely with research teams to turn frontier vision and generation capabilities into intuitive, high-craft design experiences
• Work directly with designers, internal test users, and external partners to gather feedback, iterate quickly, and validate (or invalidate) product concepts
• Set technical direction for the hardest frontend problems: editor and canvas architecture, real-time collaboration, design-system inference, rich import/export, and performance as the product scales
• Design and run experiments to test product hypotheses, from prototype tests with users to evaluations of generation quality, balancing creative exploration with rigorous measurement
• Own the quality bar for how the product looks and feels, treating latency, responsiveness, and reliability as first-class concerns rather than afterthoughts, and advocate for user experience and design considerations early in the process
• Strengthen the handoff to Claude Code so designs translate cleanly into production, and feed insights back to research about model effectiveness and where capabilities can improve
• Operate as a technical leader on a small team: shape the roadmap alongside design and product, make pragmatic architecture decisions, and mentor engineers as the team grows

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience building full-stack applications with deep frontend strength, and a track record of zero-to-one work in startup or startup-like environments
• Set technical direction for a team or workstream and mentored other engineers, while staying hands-on in the code
• Strong design sensibility and a high bar for craft; sweat interaction details, motion, and polish
• Strong technical skills across modern web stacks (React, TypeScript, Node.js, Python, Go, etc.), including complex client-side state, performance, APIs, databases, and cloud technologies
• Comfortable working in a fast-moving environment where priorities shift and shipping quickly matters
• Deeply user-centric: enjoy validating ideas with actual users before over-investing and talk about problems before solutions
• Hold strong opinions loosely: advocate forcefully for ideas but change your mind based on evidence
• Generalist who can move comfortably between frontend, backend, and product problems as the work demands
• Work independently with good judgment about what matters, without needing constant direction
• Communicate effectively and translate complex AI capabilities into intuitive experiences
• Care about the societal impacts and ethics of your work
• Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience in a field relevant to the role

Nice-to-Haves

• Extensive experience working with or building visual collaboration & creative tools (e.g., Figma, Canva, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc), and have strong opinions on how they could become more magical experiences
• Hands-on experience with UI/UX for AI-powered applications, and fluency collaborating closely with designers
• Background conducting user research, interviews, and usability testing
• Deep frontend expertise in canvas rendering, complex editor UIs, design-system tooling, or graphics work (WebGL/shaders, 3D, animation)
• Experience with real-time, collaborative applications (multiplayer editing, WebSockets) or complex, high-performance frontend interactions