Founding Design Engineer

About the Role

This is the founding design engineering role at a seed-stage AI pricing platform, sitting at the intersection of design systems and production frontend engineering. The team ships UI fast using a combination of human engineers and AI coding agents, and this role owns the coherence layer: design tokens, component libraries, and interface patterns that ensure everything shipped, regardless of who or what wrote it, feels like one unified product.

What You'll Do

• Own and evolve the design system: define and maintain design tokens, a shadcn/ui-based component library, and Tailwind conventions applied across the full product suite.

• Define and enforce frontend patterns using React Query, React Hook Form, and Zod so that agent-written pull requests land consistent by default.

• Enforce WCAG accessibility standards and integrate brand guidelines directly into the codebase.

• Audit and own frontend tooling quality: Biome configuration, Playwright end-to-end coverage, and frontend performance.

• Act as the sole bar-raiser for frontend UX across the company, reviewing and setting standards for all shipped interfaces.

• Integrate AI coding tools into frontend workflows and guide how agent-generated code meets design and quality standards.

What We're Looking For

• 5 or more years of experience building polished product interfaces, with a portfolio of shipped features demonstrating high craft.

• Demonstrated ownership of a design system or component library in production as the primary owner (portfolio, public repo, or detailed walkthrough).

• Deep expertise in React, strict TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and component primitives such as shadcn/ui and Radix UI.

• Experience translating design intent into tokens, component abstractions, and lint rules to maintain visual and interactive coherence.

• Hands-on experience with AI coding tools in production (such as Claude Code or Cursor) and comfort integrating them into frontend workflows.

• A hands-on design/UX engineering background, not a pure product design or backend background.

• Nice to have: experience building non-standard AI interfaces (streaming responses, generative views), conversational or chatbot UIs for B2B users, constrained UI environments (such as Slack Block Kit or Teams Adaptive Cards), or animation and transition work with tools like Framer Motion.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: $180,000 to $220,000 USD annually. Equity is available given the founding-team nature of the role. Visa sponsorship is not available; candidates must be authorized to work in the United States.

Location

This role is fully on-site in San Francisco, California, five days per week. Candidates must be based in San Francisco or willing and able to relocate.