Design Engineer

Location: Palo Alto, CA

Department: Engineering

About the Role

This Design Engineer will sit at the intersection of design craft and frontend engineering. You'll own the implementation layer across our product surfaces — from enterprise UI/UX to our Developer Platform — bringing designs to life with a level of polish, interaction detail, and technical rigor that neither a designer nor a traditional engineer can achieve alone. This is a founding role in a discipline we're building from the ground up.

Job Description

Design implementation & craft

• Translate high-fidelity Figma designs into production-quality React components with meticulous attention to interaction detail, animation, and edge cases.
• Own the craft layer of our product — micro-interactions, transitions, loading states, empty states — the details that separate good products from great ones.
• Build and maintain a shared component library used across Sanas's product surfaces, establishing patterns that scale as the product grows.
• Set and uphold front-end performance standards: fast load times, smooth interactions, and a consistently polished feel on both web and desktop.

Developer Platform

• Take primary ownership of the Sanas Developer Playground and Portal — the surfaces through which developers experience Sanas for the first time.
• Build interactive demos that let developers hear and feel the product in real time, directly in the browser.
• Design and implement real-time audio visualizations and model output feedback that make what Sanas is doing under the hood immediately intuitive.
• Instrument and iterate on developer onboarding flows — from first API key to first successful integration — minimizing friction at every step.

Cross-functional collaboration

• Partner closely with product designers — take their work the final mile into code without any loss of craft or intent.
• Work with ML and platform engineers to surface model capabilities — latency, confidence, language detection — in ways that are meaningful and legible to end users and developers alike.
• Contribute upstream to the design process: prototype in code, stress-test interactions early, and bring an engineering perspective to design decisions before they're locked in.
• Partner with marketing and brand to ensure all product surfaces are a coherent, high-quality extension of the Sanas identity.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of experience as a Design Engineer, creative technologist, or a frontend engineer with a strong, demonstrable design sensibility.
• Expert-level React and TypeScript — you write clean, maintainable component code and know when to use a design system versus build from scratch.
• Strong visual design instincts — you can work from a Figma file, improve it in implementation, and contribute meaningfully to the design system itself.
• Deep fluency in CSS and animation — micro-interactions, easing, motion, and responsive layout are core tools, not afterthoughts.
• Experience building interactive, data-driven UIs, ideally with real-time data, streaming content, or audio.
• A portfolio that shows both design taste and engineering depth — shipped work that demonstrates you care about the details.

Bonus

• Experience building developer-facing products: API documentation, SDKs, playgrounds, or developer portals.
• Familiarity with real-time audio visualization in the browser.
• Experience with Flutter for desktop app development.
• Fluency in modern "vibe coding" practices — Figma Make, v0, Cursor — and the ability to move fast with AI-assisted frontend development.

About the Company

Sanas is pioneering the future of human communication. Founded by a team of Stanford researchers and entrepreneurs with deep industry experience, Sanas has developed the world's first real-time speech AI platform capable of accent translation, noise cancellation, speech enhancement, cross-language communication, and more.

Sanas makes conversations clearer, more inclusive, and more effective, removing barriers that prevent people from being understood, regardless of accent, background noise, or native language.

Sanas is currently one of the fastest growing startups in Silicon Valley, growing from $16M to $50M ARR in 2025. The company's core business is profitable and is on track to end 2026 with >$120M ARR. Our team combines deep expertise in model innovation and systems engineering with a design-minded product engineering culture to build and ship cutting-edge AI models and experiences — entirely in-house.

Sanas is a 180-strong team, established in 2020. In this short span, we've successfully secured over $100 million in funding. Our innovation has been supported by the industry's leading investors, including Insight Partners, Google Ventures, Quadrille Capital, General Catalyst, Quiet Capital, and other influential investors. Our reputation is further solidified by collaborations with numerous Fortune 100 companies. With Sanas, you're not just adopting a product; you're investing in the future of communication.

If you’re looking to have a significant role in roadmapping and driving technical directions, if you’re looking to deploy challenging and big ideas without much overhead or slowness, if you're looking to leave your mark on an ambitious, generational mission to change how the worlds thinks about speech + AI, then Sanas is a well-suited place for you.