Design Engineer

Circleback•San Francisco, CA

4d•Onsite

About The Position

Circleback is building the source of truth for everything said at a company–starting with best-in-class AI meeting notes, action items, and search. Every company runs on conversations — meetings, calls, emails — but almost none of that context is usable after the fact. We’re building the platform that captures, organizes, and acts on all of it, so teams can actually use what they know. We're a small team backed by Y Combinator. Profitable, growing virally, and thousands of paying customers including PostHog, Browserbase, Gumloop, and more. We're looking for a design engineer who obsesses over how software looks and feels to join us in San Francisco. You'll own the product surface end-to-end–from concept to pixel-perfect production code–and make Circleback's design go from really good to elite.

Requirements

You're a designer who codes or an engineer with exceptional taste–either way, you can take an idea from sketch to shipped product without waiting on anyone else.
You build things for fun.
You've done this before, and you have a portfolio or shipped work that shows it.
You care about craft at a level most people find unreasonable.
You'll iterate on an animation curve five times.
You'll notice when padding is 3px off.
You have strong opinions about typography, color, and spacing–and you can articulate why something feels wrong, not just that it does.
You understand that the best product experiences are often invisible.
You're fast and pragmatic.
You'd rather ship something great today than something perfect next month.
You'd rather write a bit more code yourself than adopt a dependency.
You're interested in the challenge of making powerful tools without compromising simplicity–and you can keep a broad set of customer perspectives in mind while doing it.
You're excited about AI as a tool–both in the product you're designing and in your own workflow.
You use things like Cursor or Claude Code and have opinions about how AI should show up in product interfaces.

Responsibilities

Own the design and frontend implementation of features across web (React, Next.js), desktop (Electron, Swift), and mobile (React Native)
Deeply understand customer problems and find elegant ways to solve them–Circleback deals in dense, conversational information, and making that feel effortless to navigate is a genuinely hard design problem
Craft interactions, animations, and transitions that make the product feel fast and alive
Build and evolve our design system–components, patterns, tokens–so quality scales as we ship faster
Sweat the details other people skip: loading states, empty states, error states, keyboard shortcuts, hover treatments, the feel of a drag interaction
Iterate quickly on experiments around onboarding, activation, and education
Work directly with engineers and founders on product direction–you'll shape what we build, not just how it looks
Prototype new ideas quickly in code, not just mockups–the best way to evaluate an interaction is to use it