Founding Design Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE This is a founding-level design engineering role at a seed-stage AI pricing platform, sitting at the intersection of design systems and frontend engineering. The team ships UI fast using a small crew and AI coding agents, and this role exists to own the coherence layer: the design tokens, component library, and interface patterns that make everything feel like one product regardless of who or what wrote it. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own and evolve the design system, including design tokens, a shadcn/ui-based component library, and Tailwind conventions applied consistently across the product suite. - Define and enforce frontend patterns using React Query, React Hook Form, and Zod so that agent-written pull requests land consistently by default. - Enforce WCAG accessibility standards and integrate brand guidelines directly into the codebase. - Audit and maintain frontend tooling and quality, including Biome configuration, Playwright end-to-end coverage, and frontend performance. - Translate design intent into component abstractions and lint rules to preserve UI coherence at scale. - Act as the sole bar-raiser for frontend UX quality across the company. - Integrate AI coding tools into frontend workflows and ensure they produce output consistent with established standards. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 5 or more years building polished, production-grade product interfaces, with a portfolio of shipped features demonstrating high craft. - Demonstrated ownership of a design system or component library in production, verifiable via a public repo, portfolio, or detailed walkthrough. - 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 (for example, Claude Code or Cursor). - Comfort operating as a hands-on Design/UX Engineer rather than a product designer. - Nice to have: experience building non-standard AI interfaces such as streaming responses or generative views, shipping conversational or chatbot interfaces for B2B users, familiarity with constrained UI environments, or experience with animation libraries like Framer Motion. - Must be authorized to work in the US; visa sponsorship is not available. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Salary range: $180,000 to $220,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available. LOCATION On-site, five days per week in San Francisco, California, USA. Candidates must be based in San Francisco or willing and able to relocate.