Design Engineer

Circleback AI, Inc

$100K — $140K *
Consumer Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Proven experience as a design engineer or in a similar role
  • Strong skills in Figma, React, Next.js, Electron, Swift, and React Native
  • Demonstrated ability to create and iterate on designs without waiting for handoffs
  • Portfolio showcasing previous design and engineering projects
  • Deep understanding of user experience principles and design systems

Responsibilities

  • Own the design and frontend implementation across web, desktop, and mobile platforms
  • Understand complex customer problems and create intuitive solutions
  • Craft engaging interactions, animations, and transitions for a lively product feel
  • Build and enhance the design system to ensure scalable quality
  • Pay attention to intricate details across all user states and interactions
  • Rapidly prototype new ideas directly in code for real-time evaluation
  • Collaborate with engineers and founders to influence product direction

Benefits

  • Flexible work environment in San Francisco
  • Opportunity to work directly with product founders
  • Access to cutting-edge tools and AI technologies
  • Culture that encourages rapid iteration and experimentation
  • Possibility to shape not just appearance but functionality of the product
Full Job Description
We're looking for a design engineer who obsesses over how software looks and feels to join us in San Francisco. You'll own the product surface end-to-end-from concept to pixel-perfect production code-and make Circleback's design go from really good to elite.

What you'll do

Most companies split design and engineering into separate roles, separate teams, separate conversations. We don't want that. We want one person who can look at a feature, know how it should work, open Figma, open their editor, and ship it. No handoff. No fidelity gap. What you design is what users get.

Circleback already has a product that customers love. Your job is to take that foundation and push it to the level of the best-designed software in the world. That means:
  • Own the design and frontend implementation of features across web (React, Next.js), desktop (Electron, Swift), and mobile (React Native)
  • Deeply understand customer problems and find elegant ways to solve them-Circleback deals in dense, conversational information, and making that feel effortless to navigate is a genuinely hard design problem
  • Craft interactions, animations, and transitions that make the product feel fast and alive
  • Build and evolve our design system-components, patterns, tokens-so quality scales as we ship faster
  • Sweat the details other people skip: loading states, empty states, error states, keyboard shortcuts, hover treatments, the feel of a drag interaction
  • Iterate quickly on experiments around onboarding, activation, and education
  • Work directly with engineers and founders on product direction-you'll shape what we build, not just how it looks
  • Prototype new ideas quickly in code, not just mockups-the best way to evaluate an interaction is to use it


Who you are

You're a designer who codes or an engineer with exceptional taste-either way, you can take an idea from sketch to shipped product without waiting on anyone else. You build things for fun. You've done this before, and you have a portfolio or shipped work that shows it.

You care about craft at a level most people find unreasonable. You'll iterate on an animation curve five times. You'll notice when padding is 3px off. You have strong opinions about typography, color, and spacing-and you can articulate why something feels wrong, not just that it does. You understand that the best product experiences are often invisible.

You're fast and pragmatic. You'd rather ship something great today than something perfect next month. You'd rather write a bit more code yourself than adopt a dependency. You're interested in the challenge of making powerful tools without compromising simplicity-and you can keep a broad set of customer perspectives in mind while doing it.

You're excited about AI as a tool-both in the product you're designing and in your own workflow. You use things like Cursor or Claude Code and have opinions about how AI should show up in product interfaces.

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