Founding Design Engineer

Qumis • New York, NY

9d

About The Position

Qumis is building coverage intelligence for commercial insurance. We're a venture-backed company with top tier investors serving large enterprise customers with a venture scale growth trajectory. Our founder is a licensed insurance coverage attorney who built the company because he saw firsthand how broken the tooling is. Commercial insurance professionals (brokers, underwriters, claims handlers) manage billions in risk using workflows that haven't meaningfully evolved in decades. They're buried in 200-page policy documents, manually comparing coverage across carriers, and making high-stakes decisions with inadequate software. We're changing that. Qumis is the AI-native platform that transforms how professionals analyze, compare, and act on complex insurance policies. We're looking for a Founding Design Engineer to own the entire frontend architecture and visual experience of Qumis. This is not a role where you implement designs handed to you. You will be the architect of how insurance professionals interact with AI—defining the visual language, building the design system, and shipping production code that meets the standard of Linear, OpenAI, and Arc. You'll report directly to the CTO & Co-Founder. No layers. Full autonomy. Qumis isn't a chatbot wrapper. We're building a high-density, AI-native workspace for professionals who need to analyze complex documents under time pressure. The frontend challenges are substantial: Streaming AI Interfaces: Our platform renders AI-generated policy analysis in real-time. You'll engineer UI patterns that handle streaming LLM tokens, optimistic updates, and non-deterministic states without layout shifts or perceived latency. Document-Centric Workflows: Users upload and analyze dense policy documents—often 100+ pages. You'll build interfaces for document navigation, annotation, side-by-side comparison, and AI-assisted extraction that feel fluid, not clunky. High-Density Data Display: Insurance professionals work with complex coverage tables, exclusion matrices, and risk summaries. You'll architect performant views that present this information clearly without overwhelming the user or the browser. Design System Architecture: Our current implementation uses React 18, TypeScript, Vite, Shadcn, and Tailwind (with twin.macro). You'll audit this foundation and architect a scalable, type-safe design system that supports rapid iteration while maintaining consistency.

Requirements

• You're a hybrid. You sit at the intersection of design and engineering. You can open Figma, fix the auto-layout, and then implement the component in React—all without waiting for someone else to make decisions.
• You have architectural experience. You've seen a codebase scale. You understand when to abstract and when to ship. You know why "quick fixes" compound into debt.
• You understand the DOM deeply. You can debug re-render performance issues using the React Profiler. You understand how browsers paint, reflow, and composite.
• You care about craft. You notice when padding is inconsistent. You have opinions on easing curves. You believe B2B software deserves the same polish as the best consumer products.
• You want ownership. You're not looking to be employee #400 at a large company. You want a seat at the table, equity that matters, and the chance to define the product.

Responsibilities

• The Qumis Design System: A dedicated internal library of versioned components, tokens, and patterns. You'll define how we handle typography, spacing, color, theming, and accessibility (via Radix primitives).
• The "AI-Native" Experience: Interfaces that make AI collaboration feel seamless—command palettes, keyboard shortcuts, inline AI suggestions, and micro-interactions that communicate system state without demanding attention.
• Production-Quality Code: Clean, documented, testable components. You'll set the standard for frontend code quality—configuring linters, establishing testing patterns (Vitest/Playwright), and building the CI/CD checks that prevent regression.
• Performance & Accessibility: You'll obsess over bundle size, render cycles, and WCAG compliance. Our users often work long hours under deadline pressure; the interface needs to be fast, accessible, and reliable.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 1-10 employees