Product Design Engineer

C1 • Portland, OR

1d

About The Position

C1.ai is building a horizontal identity platform that helps companies and AI agents understand and manage access across SaaS applications, infrastructure, internal tools, and other systems. The company is small and fast-moving, and the role offers substantial ownership and autonomy on a high-output design team.

The Product Design Engineer works at the intersection of product design and hands-on development, designing and shipping experiences directly rather than handing specifications to engineering. The role emphasizes building with code and agentic development tools, moving quickly from clear product thinking to working implementations. The engineer uses research, specifications, product data, support signals, and customer feedback to inform design decisions; helps evolve the design system; and collaborates closely with product and engineering while communicating design rationale openly.

Requirements

• Strong product design skills, including layout, hierarchy, interaction patterns, and systems thinking.
• Hands-on experience building and shipping work, with a willingness to lead with code.
• Active use of AI tooling to accelerate work and an understanding of planning, context management, and clear prompting when building with AI.
• Solid Figma experience and fluency with it as part of the design tool ecosystem.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, frame vague problems clearly, and begin building toward solutions.
• Understanding of technical constraints and ability to balance design quality with pragmatic delivery.
• Experience building or contributing to design systems.
• Clear written, verbal, and visual communication skills, with a tendency to share work early and often.
• Curiosity about emerging design and AI workflows and the future of the discipline.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with identity, security, or infrastructure products.
• Familiarity with React, TypeScript, and modern CSS frameworks.
• Experience with code-native design tools such as Paper or Pen.dev, or building custom agent workflows and skills.
• A track record of making side projects, tools, prototypes, or experiments outside of one's day job.

Responsibilities

• Design and build product experiences end to end, from problem framing through working implementation.
• Use agentic coding tools, design and prototyping tools, and MCP integrations as part of a modern AI-native workflow.
• Use research, product specifications, usage data, support information, and customer feedback to identify signals and develop solutions.
• Contribute to and evolve the design system to maintain consistency and quality as the product grows.
• Work directly in code to prototype, validate, and ship UI.
• Clearly communicate the reasoning behind design decisions and share work openly.
• Collaborate closely with engineering and product to maintain quality while moving quickly.

What This Job Offers

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