Founding Design Engineer

What you'll own

• Translate company strategy and user needs into visual language, including product UI and user stories. Turn go-to-market bets into immediately understandable experiences.
• Own and evolve the design system: rules, components, patterns, and principles that enable the engineering team to iterate quickly while maintaining legibility.
• Author front-end code to build and maintain the design system, prototype ideas, and ship polish without depending on the engineering queue. (No backend responsibilities unless interested.)

The honest split

This role is roughly 70% design, 30% code. You'll be self-sufficient in prototyping and able to handle frontend-specific production changes. Ideal for a brilliant designer who codes enough to be dangerous.

You'll thrive here if

• You think in systems and turn deep user needs into reusable patterns that act as force multipliers for the team.
• You can synthesize strategy from users and the team into a compelling visual story.
• You have strong, defensible opinions about type, layout, motion, and information density.
• Enterprise, technical, developer-facing products excite you; making the complicated feel simple is the core of the job.
• You want the range and ownership that only exist at a small company.

Requirements

• Experience defining design for complex enterprise software, especially technical/developer-facing products.
• Strong front-end coding skills sufficient for design systems, prototyping, and light production frontend work.
• Ability to deeply understand user needs and translate them into visual language and reusable systems.

Nice-to-haves

• Background or interest in AI, governance, security, or complex data workflows.
• Prior experience at high-impact institutions or with similar technical products.