Design Technologist

Mithrl • San Francisco, CA

9d • Onsite

About The Position

As a Design Technologist at Mithrl, you will sit at the intersection of design, engineering, and artificial intelligence. This is a high-impact individual contributor role where you will bridge what is possible with what is usable.
You will work directly with our Design Leads and collaborate daily with our Head of Product, engineers, and scientists. You are not just building interfaces. You are defining how researchers at the world's largest pharmaceutical companies interact with one of the most complex biological knowledge systems ever built.
This is a role for a builder who has deep visual craft and deep technical fluency, and knows how to use both at the same time.

Requirements

• Technical Excellence: You are a frontend expert (React, TypeScript, CSS) who views code as a creative medium. You have a track record of leading complex frontend projects and influencing technical roadmaps.
• Design Craft: You have a strong foundation in visual and interaction design and you apply these with a high degree of intentionality. You understand information density, data visualization, and scientific workflows.
• Domain Curiosity: You do not need a biology degree, but you need to care about the problem. Building interfaces on top of protein-protein interaction networks, biomarker data, and ontology graphs requires genuine intellectual engagement with the domain.
• Experience: 5+ years in product design or frontend engineering, with a significant focus on design technology, prototyping, or building design-centric products at scale.
• Startup Mindset: You are comfortable working from first principles in a fast-paced environment. You ship fast, iterate, and do not wait for perfect requirements.
• Product Thinking: You do not just build what is on the roadmap. You understand the why behind features and advocate for the best end-to-end user experience.

Responsibilities

• Bridge Design and Code: Partner closely with a small team of product designers to transform high-level concepts into elegant, functional products used by thousands of researchers every day.
• Own Complex Frontend Surfaces: Lead frontend initiatives for our most technically demanding product areas, including knowledge graph visualizations, ontology explorers, and AI-native query interfaces.
• Build Advanced Prototypes: Create high-fidelity, interactive prototypes that leverage real biological data and APIs to test complex interactions and AI-driven workflows. Your prototypes need to hold up under production conditions.
• Shape Architectural Decisions: Participate in technical planning, code reviews, and ongoing platform evolution. You will influence how we think about our UI architecture across EOS (our enterprise product) and Finn (our self-serve platform).
• Establish Patterns: Lead frontend initiatives that set the standard for our UI design system, ensuring our product remains performant, accessible, and scalable across both products.
• Evolve Our Design System: Contribute to and maintain a robust design system. Develop reusable components that ensure visual and brand consistency across our entire platform.
• Innovate with AI: Experiment with emerging AI tools and techniques to accelerate our design-to-code pipeline. We use AI aggressively in our own internal workflows and expect you to push what is possible here.
• Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Work closely with engineering and product leaders to ensure that design intent is preserved from discovery through deployment.

Benefits

• Team: Join a tight-knit, talent-dense team of engineers, scientists, and builders. We are about 22 people and every person here is exceptional at what they do.
• Design-First Culture: Our first hire was a designer. Design has a seat at every table here, including architecture reviews, product strategy, and customer conversations.
• Real Scientific Impact: Your work is directly used by researchers at J&J, Roche, Lilly, and more, on programs that matter. This is not an enterprise SaaS dashboard. This is drug discovery infrastructure.
• Speed: We ship twice a week and improve continuously based on real user feedback.
• Location: Beautiful SF office with a high-energy, in-person culture.
• Benefits: Comprehensive PPO health coverage through Anthem (medical, dental, vision), 401(k), and competitive equity.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed