Product Design Engineer

C1 • Portland, OR

2d

About The Position

C1.ai is building a horizontal identity platform that helps organizations and AI agents understand and manage access across SaaS applications, infrastructure, and internal tools. The company is small and moves quickly, offering substantial ownership.

The Product Design Engineer works at the intersection of product design and hands-on implementation. This is not a traditional handoff-based design role: the position designs and ships product experiences, often in the same session, with agentic development as a core part of the workflow. The role is part of a small, high-output design team whose members work with significant ownership and autonomy.

The successful candidate has strong product design instincts, leads with building, and moves between design tools and AI coding harnesses, with an emphasis on code. They can identify why a solution should exist and how it should work, then turn that understanding into a working implementation. They use research, product specifications, product usage, support signals, and customer feedback to inform decisions, and communicate the rationale behind their work openly.

Requirements

• Strong product design skills, including layout, hierarchy, interaction patterns, and systems thinking.
• Solid Figma experience and fluency with the tool.
• Active use of AI tooling to accelerate work, with the ability to evaluate tools and try new ones.
• Ability to plan AI-assisted development, manage context deliberately, and write clear prompts to guide models effectively.
• Comfort navigating ambiguity, framing vague problems, and beginning to build toward solutions.
• Understanding of technical constraints and judgment about when to advocate for design quality and when to ship a pragmatic solution.
• 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.
• Experience building personal agent workflows and skills.
• A track record of making side projects, tools, prototypes, or experiments outside of work.

Responsibilities

• Design and build product experiences end to end, from problem framing through working implementation.
• Use an AI-native toolkit, including agentic coding harnesses, design and prototyping tools, and MCP integrations, to move ideas into artifacts quickly.
• Make data-informed design decisions using research and specifications from product designers and product managers, as well as signals from usage, support, and customer feedback.
• 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 user interfaces as a default way of working.
• Clearly and publicly communicate the rationale behind design decisions.
• Collaborate closely with engineering and product teams to maintain quality while working quickly.

What This Job Offers

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