Design Engineer

The opportunity

Our core thesis: 85% of what engineers do today is theoretically automatable, yet less than 5% has actually been touched by AI. That gap is the largest of any profession. Our plan is to close it by acquiring engineering firms, building purpose-built tools for their staff, and compounding that proprietary intelligence across acquisitions.

As a Design Engineer, you'll work directly with the CTO to own how that intelligence becomes something engineers actually trust and use. The hard part isn't only modeling the data-it's making non-deterministic, agentic systems legible to people who have never worked with a software company before. You own the surface where that trust is won or lost. You get a front-row seat to building a company from zero-engaging with product strategy, firm acquisitions, and architecture decisions-on a problem domain that's barely been touched by AI.

What you'll do

• Embed with staff at engineering firms alongside the founders; watch how they actually work, then come back and design and build against what you saw
• Own the product surface end-to-end-from interaction design and prototyping through shipping the production front-end yourself
• Establish and own our design system: the components, patterns, and primitives that have to stay coherent as we compound products across acquisitions
• Define the interaction patterns for an AI-native platform-streaming and latency, human-in-the-loop review, provenance and citations, and making agent behavior transparent enough to trust
• Collaborate directly with the CTO on product direction, culture, and what we'll build next

What we look for

• Strong design taste and the engineering chops to ship it yourself in production (React/TypeScript or equivalent)-you don't hand off to someone else to build
• Has built and maintained a design system that more than one product or team depended on
• Has real reps designing UX for AI-native products and is comfortable with the problems that don't exist in traditional software: non-determinism, streaming output, uncertainty, agentic flows, and earning user trust in machine output
• Has a deep curiosity for how things work (an organization, a workflow, a market)
• Isn't afraid to expose their ignorance and is constantly asking why
• Has the poise and communication skills to earn trust with people who've never worked with a tech company before
• Can sit with noisy, conflicting feedback from users and distill it into a clear opinion about what to build
• Is willing to get on a plane with us
• Is not above any task: up to draw the icon set, write the component, sit beside a user and watch them click, or wire up an off-the-shelf tool to test an idea fast

Compensation

• Competitive cash compensation ($150K-$300K depending on experience)
• Founding equity, scaled to scope
• Full healthcare benefits
• In-person office in NYC