Staff Design Engineer

Clerk Chat•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Clerk Chat is a conversational AI platform that handles customer communications across SMS, voice, and email channels. Recently Series A funded, we're scaling our engineering team with strategic focus on AI Voice and RCS initiatives.

Requirements

Minimum 5 years of tech/startup or digital product agency experience, or equivalent
Strong proficiency in Figma and modern design tools
Extraordinary visual design skills with strong understanding of UX/UI principles, particularly for data-heavy interfaces and analytics platforms
Front-end development skills in semantic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (React preferred) - ability to collaborate closely with engineers and understand implementation constraints
Experience designing complex dashboards, monitoring tools, or analytics interfaces
Strong organizational skills and love for documentation
Excellent communication and collaboration skills, bridging the gap between design and engineering
Comfort working in a technical environment with APIs, webhooks, and developer-focused products

Nice To Haves

Experience with conversational UI/chat interface design
Understanding of AI/ML products and their unique UX challenges
Background in real-time data visualization and monitoring systems
Experience maintaining design systems or reusable component libraries
Familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol) or API-driven architectures
Experience at growth-stage startups (Series A/B)

Responsibilities

Design and evolve analytics and monitoring interfaces for AI agent performance tracking, execution monitoring, and real-time alerting systems and conversational interface.
Create intuitive conversational experiences that integrate analytics visualizations, inspired by modern chat interfaces like Perplexity
Work directly with the CTO and engineering team to develop UI/UX for complex multi-channel communication management (SMS, voice, email)
Champion user experience and accessibility across our platform, maintaining a high quality bar for both technical and non-technical users
Contribute to the design and development of reusable component patterns for agent configuration, dashboard visualization, and real-time data displays
Collaborate with engineers on elegant and consistent component APIs using TypeScript/React, with focus on developer experience
Advocate for users by identifying areas of improvement in our analytics interfaces, agent monitoring dashboards, and communication workflows
Participate in day-to-day team rituals like design crit, story creation, weekly stand-ups, and sprint planning
Help us hire more amazing people to grow the team and bring diverse perspectives to our design process
Document design patterns, guidelines, and best practices for our growing product surface area