Founding Design Engineer

Circleback•San Francisco, CA

57d•$170,000 - $280,000•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. Design is core to Circleback’s strategy. We’re product-led, and one of the hardest problems we have is making something powerful enough for sophisticated teams while still feeling simple and intuitive to anyone who opens it. You’ll have a huge amount of ownership over what Circleback looks and feels like. One of your first priorities will be establishing and codifying our design system, then carrying it consistently across web, Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android. You’ll work directly with a small engineering team that cares deeply about craft and wants to push the product bar higher. From there, the problems get much more open-ended. We already have customers with 500+ seats using Circleback to search and reference what’s been said across their company. The next step is helping them make sense of all of that context without having to go looking for it: proactively organizing, synthesizing, and surfacing what matters. There isn’t an established interface for this yet. You’ll help invent it. Longer term, Circleback is becoming much more than a meeting note-taker. We’re building the operational source of truth for a team: a horizontal product that can understand and represent everything from a candidate or customer to a project or decision across dozens of conversations. That means designing flexible primitives like tables, charts, and workflows, while figuring out how those building blocks should adapt to completely different kinds of work. You’ll also work on growth and because Circleback grows through the product itself, seemingly small improvements to onboarding, activation, and collaboration can have an outsized impact on the business. And this role can grow with the company. As we build out the design function, there’s a path to leading it: identifying what we need next, shaping how design operates at Circleback, and eventually building the team around you.

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