Founding Design Engineer

Mondrio • San Francisco, CA

2d • $180,000 - $220,000 • Onsite

About The Position

We ship UI fast: a team of under ten plus AI coding agents that write production pull requests. Speed is not our problem. Coherence is, and this role owns it: the design tokens, the component library, the frontend and conversational interface patterns that make everything we ship, human-written or agent-written, feel like one product.
We’re looking for a Design Engineer to raise the bar on interaction quality, motion, and polish across our product. This role sits at the intersection of design and engineering: you'll work directly with the executive team, pricing architects and engineers to ship new features that feel crafted, consistent, and human.

Requirements

• 5+ years building product interfaces, with a portfolio of shipped features you can point to that rivals Linear/Vercel-like polish
• You have owned a design system or component library in production, as its primary owner. Public repo, portfolio, or a detailed walkthrough of proprietary work all count.
• You care deeply about typography, spatial rhythm, motion, and tactile micro-interactions. You instantly spot when a screen is 2px off or a transition feels sluggish ßand you refine it directly in code
• Deep expertise in React, strict TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and component primitives (shadcn/ui, Radix UI). You know how to keep a typed codebase honest, flexible, and scalable.
• Taste plus systems thinking: You don't just tweak a screen once; you translate design intent into design tokens, component abstractions, and lint rules. You turn your taste into automated guardrails so that code written by humans or AI agents stays coherent by default.
• Comfortable being the sole bar-raiser for user experience, interface craft, and frontend standards across the entire company.
• You can show how AI coding tools fit into your work today. We weigh that over where you studied or your previous role.
• Work authorization: You must be authorized to work in the US. We're unable to sponsor visas at this time.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building non-standard AI interfaces (e.g., streaming responses, generative canvas views, human-in-the-loop workflows) using the Vercel AI SDK or custom state machines.
• A deep toolkit for animation and UI state transitions (e.g., Framer Motion, Radix transitions) that make interfaces feel fast, tactile, and alive.
• Ability to refine visual details, layout, and hierarchy directly in code without waiting for high-fidelity Figma handoffs.
• Experience working alongside AI coding agents such as Claude Code or Cursor specifically writing custom rules (eg .cursorrules, claude.md, custom Biome/ESLint rules) to guide component generation and styling.
• Experience designing and shipping conversational interfaces or chatbots that delight B2B end-users.
• Familiarity with Slack Block Kit, Microsoft Teams Adaptive Cards, or CLI design patterns, where visual real estate is constrained and typography/structure carry the brand identity.

Responsibilities

• Own the design system: design tokens, the shadcn/ui-based component library, and Tailwind conventions across our product suite.
• Shape the brand identity of our conversational agents and bots within our customer’s communication platforms like Slack and Teams
• Define the React Query, React Hook Form, and Zod patterns that engineers and AI coding agents both follow, so agent-written pull requests land consistent by default. The design system serves as the guardrail.
• Enforce accessibility. WCAG contrast rules are written into our brand guidelines, and you make the product honor them.
• Own frontend tooling and quality: Biome configuration, Playwright E2E coverage, and frontend performance.
• Partner directly with the founders on how the brand shows up in product.
• Keep the frontend what our architecture says it is: a thin, replaceable layer over the versioned API. Your job is to make thin also mean polished.

Benefits

• A market-conform package, including health coverage, pension/retirement provision, generous paid time off, paid parental leave.
• Direct customer contact from early on: you hear how your recommendations land.
• Real influence on the architecture while the big decisions are still open. The AI layer is young, and you set its shape.
• A team where your impact is visible.
• An opportunity to be part of a fast-growing company.
• Daily work with, and real influence over, a cutting-edge AI pricing engine.
• Continuous exposure to the newest AI tools and techniques.

What This Job Offers

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