Staff Design Engineer

Location: San Francisco

Department: Design

Staff Design Engineer

Clerk Chat | Full-time

About Clerk Chat

Clerk Chat is a conversational AI platform that handles customer communications across SMS, voice, and email channels. Recently Series A funded, we're scaling our engineering team with strategic focus on AI Voice and RCS initiatives.

What You'll Do

• Design and evolve analytics and monitoring interfaces for AI agent performance tracking, execution monitoring, and real-time alerting systems and conversational interface.
• Create intuitive conversational experiences that integrate analytics visualizations, inspired by modern chat interfaces like Perplexity
• Work directly with the CTO and engineering team to develop UI/UX for complex multi-channel communication management (SMS, voice, email)
• Champion user experience and accessibility across our platform, maintaining a high quality bar for both technical and non-technical users
• Contribute to the design and development of reusable component patterns for agent configuration, dashboard visualization, and real-time data displays
• Collaborate with engineers on elegant and consistent component APIs using TypeScript/React, with focus on developer experience
• Advocate for users by identifying areas of improvement in our analytics interfaces, agent monitoring dashboards, and communication workflows
• Participate in day-to-day team rituals like design crit, story creation, weekly stand-ups, and sprint planning
• Help us hire more amazing people to grow the team and bring diverse perspectives to our design process
• Document design patterns, guidelines, and best practices for our growing product surface area

What You Need

• Minimum 5 years of tech/startup or digital product agency experience, or equivalent
• Strong proficiency in Figma and modern design tools
• Extraordinary visual design skills with strong understanding of UX/UI principles, particularly for data-heavy interfaces and analytics platforms
• Front-end development skills in semantic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (React preferred) - ability to collaborate closely with engineers and understand implementation constraints
• Experience designing complex dashboards, monitoring tools, or analytics interfaces
• Strong organizational skills and love for documentation
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, bridging the gap between design and engineering
• Comfort working in a technical environment with APIs, webhooks, and developer-focused products

Nice to Have

• Experience with conversational UI/chat interface design
• Understanding of AI/ML products and their unique UX challenges
• Background in real-time data visualization and monitoring systems
• Experience maintaining design systems or reusable component libraries
• Familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol) or API-driven architectures
• Experience at growth-stage startups (Series A/B)