Founding Design Engineer

Circleback AI, Inc

$125K — $150K *
Consumer Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of experience in design and frontend development
  • Strong proficiency in React, Next.js, Electron, Swift, and React Native
  • Portfolio demonstrating previous successful product designs and implementations
  • Exceptional attention to detail and a passion for design craft
  • Ability to prototype rapidly and iterate on designs involving complex interactions
  • Experience collaborating directly with engineers and product teams
  • A keen interest in AI technologies and their applications in product design

Responsibilities

  • Own the design and frontend implementation across multiple platforms
  • Deeply understand and creatively solve user problems related to dense information
  • Craft dynamic interactions, animations, and transitions for an engaging user experience
  • Build and enhance the design system to ensure scalability and consistency
  • Focus on intricate details that enhance user interactions and overall experience
  • Iterate rapidly on onboarding and activation experiments for user growth
  • Collaborate with engineers and founders to dictate product direction

Benefits

  • Flexible work environment in a product-led company
  • Ownership over design and product outcomes
  • Opportunities to lead and expand the design function
  • Collaborative culture focused on innovation and craft
  • Unique chance to shape a pioneering tool utilizing AI technologies
Full Job Description
We9re looking for a design engineer who obsesses over how software looks and feels to join us in San Francisco. You9ll own the product surface end-to-end-from concept to pixel-perfect production code-and make Circleback9s design go from really good to elite. Design is core to Circleback9s strategy. We9re product-led, and one of the hardest problems we have is making something powerful enough for sophisticated teams while still feeling simple and intuitive to anyone who opens it. You9ll have a huge amount of ownership over what Circleback looks and feels like. One of your first priorities will be establishing and codifying our design system, then carrying it consistently across web, Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android. You9ll work directly with a small engineering team that cares deeply about craft and wants to push the product bar higher. From there, the problems get much more open-ended. We already have customers with 500+ seats using Circleback to search and reference what9s been said across their company. The next step is helping them make sense of all of that context without having to go looking for it: proactively organizing, synthesizing, and surfacing what matters. There isn9t an established interface for this yet. You9ll help invent it. Longer term, Circleback is becoming much more than a meeting note-taker. We9re building the operational source of truth for a team: a horizontal product that can understand and represent everything from a candidate or customer to a project or decision across dozens of conversations. That means designing flexible primitives like tables, charts, and workflows, while figuring out how those building blocks should adapt to completely different kinds of work. You9ll also work on growth and because Circleback grows through the product itself, seemingly small improvements to onboarding, activation, and collaboration can have an outsized impact on the business. And this role can grow with the company. As we build out the design function, there9s a path to leading it: identifying what we need next, shaping how design operates at Circleback, and eventually building the team around you. Most companies split design and engineering into separate roles, separate teams, separate conversations. We don9t 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: 3 Own the design and frontend implementation of features across web (React, Next.js), desktop (Electron, Swift), and mobile (React Native) 3 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 3 Craft interactions, animations, and transitions that make the product feel fast and alive 3 Build and evolve our design system-components, patterns, tokens-so quality scales as we ship faster 3 Sweat the details other people skip: loading states, empty states, error states, keyboard shortcuts, hover treatments, the feel of a drag interaction 3 Iterate quickly on experiments around onboarding, activation, and education 3 Work directly with engineers and founders on product direction-you9ll shape what we build, not just how it looks 3 Prototype new ideas quickly in code, not just mockups-the best way to evaluate an interaction is to use it You9re 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. You9ve 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. You9ll iterate on an animation curve five times. You9ll 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. You9re fast and pragmatic. You9d rather ship something great today than something perfect next month. You9d rather write a bit more code yourself than adopt a dependency. You9re 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. You9re excited about AI as a tool-both in the product you9re 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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