Design Research Engineer

Taste Labs

• $120K — $145K *
Consumer Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of experience in design or related field
  • Strong understanding of design principles and taste
  • Experience collaborating with engineering and research teams
  • Familiarity with AI tools and coding
  • Ability to differentiate personal preference from design standards
  • Curiosity-driven approach to research and evaluation
  • Background in creative technology or personal projects is a plus

Responsibilities

  • Analyze and redefine what constitutes 'great' design
  • Collaborate with engineers to integrate design into product development
  • Conduct research on design styles and components of creativity
  • Create frameworks to evaluate and measure design quality
  • Develop innovative methods for collecting user feedback on design
  • Evaluate visual designs based on principles of typography, color, and layout
  • Identify and address visual design issues, including the concept of 'AI slop'

Benefits

  • Opportunity to work at the intersection of design and technology
  • Collaborative environment with cross-functional teams
  • Focus on research-driven design methodologies
  • Access to the latest AI tools and technologies
  • Chance to shape the future of design evaluation at Taste
Full Job Description
About the role

This is not a typical design role. At Taste, design is the product. You will help to decode the fuzzy problem of what "great" means in design and have this wisdom feed into interfaces, eval design, and crafting products with our engineering and research teams.

You will spend more of your day in code or with researchers than you will in Figma. If you're curious, have an absurdly high bar for quality and are AI pilled, this is for you.

Types of questions you'll be thinking about:
  • What is creativity? How do we break down components of creativity?
  • What leads to great and bad visual design? How can this be turned into an eval
  • What are creative, interesting ways we can collect data
  • How do we classify design styles?
  • What is the best interface to collect designer feedback on their reasoning behind why they love or hate a particular design?
  • What are fundamentals of typography, color, layout, alignment? How do I make this measurable?
  • How would I develop a framework around what "great design" means?
  • What is AI slop? How can I spot it?


What we're looking for:
  • You have amazing taste. You've honed your taste for years, you're opinionated and have wide references, and you have the ability to separate what's a personal preference vs. a ground truth
  • You are deeply curious and think like a researcher
  • You are AI forward - you tinker with AI tools, you're in claude code/cursor/codex, you ship design in code
  • You are great at collaborating with others across design, product, research, engineering, customers
  • Bonus: you've worked in creative technology companies, research labs or did your own personal projects on the subject.

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