Staff Designer, Rapid Prototyping
Staff Designer shaping an open-source AI product from early concepts through functional prototypes and production experiences. The role combines product and interaction design with front-end implementation, requiring 10+ years of relevant experience and strong judgment around usability, accessibility, security, privacy, and user trust.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Build functional prototypes and product experiments directly in the Thunderbolt codebase.
- Translate ambiguous product ideas, user workflows, partner feedback, and enterprise needs into clear, usable product experiences.
- Define interaction patterns for AI-powered chat, search, research, workflow automation, knowledge retrieval, and enterprise administration.
- Use AI-assisted development tools while maintaining quality, usability, security, accessibility, and maintainability.
- Partner with product, design, engineering, and enterprise-facing teams to explore, validate, and refine product direction.
- Contribute production-quality front-end code where appropriate.
- Determine when prototypes should be discarded, refined, generalized, or productionized.
- Improve usability, accessibility, consistency, and polish.
- Develop reusable components, interface patterns, and design-system elements.
- Bring user-centered judgment to questions involving AI behavior, trust, transparency, permissions, and workflow clarity.
- Account for enterprise needs such as data sensitivity, user control, administrative visibility, auditability, and security.
Requirements
- 10+ years of relevant experience in design engineering, front-end engineering, UX engineering, technically focused product design, or a related field.
- Demonstrated leadership and impact beyond individual deliverables.
- Strong JavaScript or TypeScript skills and experience with component-based frameworks.
- Strong product and interaction design judgment, including usability, accessibility, information architecture, workflow design, and product polish.
- Experience designing, prototyping, or building AI-enabled product experiences.
- Experience translating ambiguous concepts into workflows, prototypes, and shipped experiences.
- Experience providing technical or product leadership through mentoring, cross-functional coordination, reusable patterns, project ownership, or influence.
- Awareness of AI, privacy, security, and regulatory considerations, including transparency, permissions, data handling, and user trust.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills.
- Portfolio, case studies, shipped work, or examples demonstrating design-to-code execution, interactive prototypes, or product improvements.
Nice-to-haves
- Experience with enterprise software, developer tools, productivity tools, collaboration tools, self-hosted software, or technical user workflows.
- Experience with design systems, component libraries, reusable front-end architecture, or shared interaction patterns.
- Familiarity with user research, usability testing, feature instrumentation, product discovery, or rapid experimentation.
- Experience in open-source or highly collaborative engineering environments.
Compensation
- Canada: $155,000–$175,000 CAD base salary.
- Remote, full-time position.
Skills
JavaScript, TypeScript, Component-Based Frameworks, Front-End Engineering, Product Design, Interaction Design, Accessibility, Information Architecture, Ai-Assisted Development, Design Systems, User Research, Usability Testing, Open Source
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