Founding Design Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

About the Role

This is a founding-level frontend role at a seed-stage B2B SaaS startup building an AI-native pricing intelligence platform. You'll own the entire frontend design system — tokens, component library, and interface patterns — ensuring everything shipped, whether by humans or AI coding agents, feels like one cohesive product. As the sole bar-raiser for frontend UX, your work directly shapes how enterprise customers experience pricing strategy and deal intelligence.

What You'll Do

• Define and maintain the design token system, shadcn/ui-based component library, and Tailwind conventions across the full product suite.

• Enforce consistent frontend patterns using React Query, React Hook Form, and Zod so that agent-generated PRs land coherently by default.

• Audit and own frontend tooling and quality, including Biome configuration, Playwright E2E coverage, and frontend performance.

• Integrate brand guidelines and WCAG accessibility rules directly into the codebase and lint rules.

• Translate design intent into component abstractions and tooling guardrails that scale as the team and AI agents ship more UI.

• Work with AI coding tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) as a first-class part of your daily workflow and help the team integrate them into frontend processes.

• Shape conversational and streaming UI patterns for the platform's AI-native interfaces.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years building polished, production product interfaces with a strong portfolio of shipped features.

• Proven primary ownership of a design system or component library in production (public repo or detailed walkthrough required).

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

• Hands-on experience with AI coding tools in production workflows.

• Comfort being the sole frontend UX standard-setter across a fast-moving, small team.

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

• Must be authorized to work in the US — visa sponsorship is not available.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $180,000 – $220,000 USD annually. Equity participation expected at the founding team level. No visa sponsorship available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, CA. This is not a remote role.