Senior Design Engineer

Description

The work is building consumer interfaces where a person, or an AI agent acting for them, needs to know what is actually true about a purchase. The company answers those questions with proof.

The company's first proof at scale is a code verification service with about $22M in annual revenue. It is profitable, founder-owned since 2009, bootstrapped, has no outside investors and no board, and has fewer than twenty operators.

The team is shipping several consumer surfaces at once: the shop Verification Checker, where shoppers paste in a recommendation from an AI, article, brand page or friend and get each claim graded across five verification states; a conversational shopping assistant that puts proof beside its answers; and the code verification pages and browser extension that millions of shoppers use daily.

The shop Design Record holds the tokens, components and motion rules that coding agents read when they generate the interfaces, so the design system directly controls what ships. Streaming, interruption and motion are treated as design decisions.

You will work directly with the Founding Designer and the founder, who both want a senior person who designs and builds at the same time. The company is a direct-build environment without design-management layers, and you will be working inside its internal AI system daily, where any operator can change company rules without founder sign-off.

Responsibilities

• Take a design from rough exploration to live production React and TypeScript code in the same session, with no handoff.
• Build and maintain the canonical components, tokens, motion rules and usage guidance in the shop Design Record, which apply across the shop, the Verification Checker, the code verification pages and the browser extension.
• Design and build the Verification Checker, the conversational assistant and its evidence side panel, covering how a verdict shows across five verification states, how proof opens beside it, and how streaming and state changes feel.
• Help set and raise the visual, interaction and motion standard across all consumer surfaces alongside the Founding Designer and the founder.
• Own the detail work: motion, state, spacing, typography and micro-interactions that make a trust interface feel credible.
• Within your first quarter, co-write a charter for this role that names one number a machine can check to show the role is working.

Requirements

• A real human-computer interaction background, shown through your work rather than design vocabulary alone.
• A strong design eye, demonstrated through a live portfolio of shipped work that a stranger can judge quickly.
• Production-quality skills in React, TypeScript and CSS.
• Fluency in Figma.
• Ability to design motion and interface state on purpose.
• Experience using AI coding and design tools, with every output checked by hand.
• Experience as a senior design engineer or frontend engineer with clear design taste, a principal or senior product designer who ships production React code, or someone who designed and shipped a consumer product end to end.
• You see each screen as a system: its current state, what it tells the person, and where friction sits. You think about what the person is deciding, what they can perceive, and how layout, type and motion build trust.
• You have shipped interfaces that real people used, and you can show them live and explain what you decided and why. Examples include a product people trusted with a decision, a design system other engineers built with, or a prototype that became production. Your portfolio matters more than your resume.
• You work in a design tool, a coding agent and a browser at the same time, most of the day.

Conditions

Total first-year compensation is $350,000 to $450,000, combining base salary and performance-based profit interest unit ownership and profit-share.

Base salary is $220,000 to $280,000.

Based in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, on a hybrid schedule: four in-office half-days together on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday from 9am to 2pm, with Wednesdays left open for deep work and afternoons free to work from wherever you do your best work.

Relocation support is available for the right candidate.

Benefits

• Profit interest units with a $0 strike price. They share in annual free-cash-flow distributions and annual company tender liquidity, and are earned on performance milestones after you join, never vesting on day one. Formal terms follow the plan documents provided at the offer stage.
• 100% coverage of family health insurance premiums.
• An effectively unlimited token budget for AI tools, guided by return and never capped.