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 AI SaaS startup building an intelligent pricing platform for B2B companies. You will own the design system end to end, setting the standards that keep everything the team ships, whether human-written or agent-written, feeling like one coherent product. As the sole bar-raiser for frontend UX across a small, fast-moving team, your work will directly shape the product's quality and identity.

What You'll Do

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

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

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

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

• Collaborate with AI coding tools in production workflows to review, guide, and uplift agent-generated UI contributions.

• Build and iterate on conversational and streaming AI interface patterns suited to B2B end-users.

What We're Looking For

• 5 or more years building polished, production-grade product interfaces, with a portfolio of shipped features to demonstrate it.

• Experience as the primary owner of a design system or component library in a production environment.

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

• Proven ability to translate design intent into design tokens, component abstractions, and lint rules that maintain coherence at scale.

• Comfort acting as the sole frontend standard-setter in a small startup environment.

• Experience using AI coding assistants (such as Claude Code or Cursor) in real production workflows.

• Familiarity with non-standard AI interfaces, streaming responses, or generative views is a strong plus.

• Experience with constrained UI environments such as Slack Block Kit, Microsoft Teams Adaptive Cards, or CLI patterns is a plus.

• Experience with animation and UI state transitions (such as Framer Motion or Radix) is a plus.

• Authorization to work in the United States is required; visa sponsorship is not available.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: $180,000 to $220,000 USD annually. Equity is expected at the founding team level. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California, five days per week. Candidates must be based in San Francisco or willing to relocate.