Founding Design Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE Join a small team building an AI-powered pricing optimization platform for businesses. You will own frontend coherence across the product, shaping the design system and interaction patterns that help the team ship quickly without sacrificing polish or usability. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own and evolve the production design system, including design tokens, component libraries, and frontend interaction patterns. - Build polished product interfaces and conversational experiences, including streaming responses and generative views. - Define and enforce consistent frontend patterns so that both human-written and AI-assisted code fits the product. - Establish patterns for React Query, React Hook Form, and Zod, and translate design intent into reusable abstractions and lint rules. - Audit and improve frontend tooling, accessibility, Playwright end-to-end coverage, and performance. - Use AI coding tools in production workflows and help raise the bar for frontend UX across the team. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - At least 5 years building product interfaces, with a portfolio showing polished, shipped features. - Experience as the primary owner of a production design system or component library, demonstrated through a public repository, portfolio, or detailed walkthrough. - Deep hands-on expertise with React, strict TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and component primitives such as shadcn/ui or Radix UI. - Experience building B2B conversational interfaces or chatbots; familiarity with constrained UI patterns such as Slack Block Kit, Teams Adaptive Cards, or CLI interfaces is a plus. - Experience with animation and UI state transitions, as well as production AI coding tools such as Claude Code or Cursor. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Base salary is $180,000 to $220,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available. LOCATION This is an on-site role in San Francisco, California, with five days per week in person. Candidates must be based in San Francisco or willing and able to relocate.