Design Engineer

A design engineer at Valthos helps define how the platform works and feels from the ground up. The work spans product design and frontend engineering and requires direct collaboration with computational biologists, engineers, business development, and users on workflows that are still rough or only partly understood. A project may begin with a sketch, move into a coded prototype, and end as production software tested against how people actually work. There is no handoff between design and engineering; the role owns the path from idea to working product.

The person who thrives here has strong taste but is not precious about process. They are curious enough to learn a hard domain, technical enough to carry an idea into production, and thoughtful enough to simplify without hiding what matters. They notice when a chart is technically correct but misleading, when a workflow asks too much of the user, or when a polished screen still has not earned trust. They care about the details because, in this product, the details affect whether the answer is useful.

This role carries genuine ownership over the product's visual language, interaction patterns, and design foundations. It is an opportunity to build serious software for serious work-and make it genuinely good to use.

The Role

• Own the design and frontend implementation of core product experiences, from early user flows and prototypes through production-ready interfaces
• Work directly with users, founders, engineers, and computational biologists to understand complex operational and scientific workflows and translate them into clear, usable software
• Design and build interfaces for data exploration, analytical workflows, alerts, review processes, and decision support, preserving the evidence and context users need to evaluate the result and determine what to do next
• Rapidly prototype new product concepts for user research, pilots, demos, and customer discovery, and refine them through feedback and observations
• Establish and evolve the visual language, interaction patterns, design system, and component foundations that keep the product coherent as it grows
• Bring strong product judgment to decisions across information architecture, data visualization, interaction design, and frontend architecture
• Improve the clarity, credibility, and usability of the product across onboarding, navigation, workflow execution, results interpretation, and review

Qualifications (required)

• Demonstrated experience owning both the design and frontend implementation of production-quality web applications, from early exploration through shipped product
• Strong product and design judgment across interaction, information, and visual design, with the ability to create clear hierarchy, thoughtful flows, and polished interfaces for complex or information-dense software
• Demonstrated ability to translate technical, ambiguous, or unfamiliar workflows into understandable software without removing the detail users need to make good decisions
• Strong frontend engineering skills, especially with React, TypeScript, modern CSS, and component-based application architecture
• Fluency moving between sketches, Figma, coded prototypes, and production implementation, with good judgment about the right level of fidelity for the problem
• Systems thinking across design and engineering, with an emphasis on reusable interaction patterns, coherent product structure, maintainable components, and a consistent design language
• Demonstrated ability to learn quickly, work independently, make reasonable tradeoffs, and carry an unclear problem through to a shipped solution
• Strong communication skills, especially around design rationale, product tradeoffs, and implementation decisions
• Comfort working on sensitive biological and national-security problems with discretion and good judgment

Qualifications (preferred)

• Experience designing analytical, scientific, developer, operational, or other data-rich software
• Experience building data visualizations, maps, timelines, graphs, or other visual representations beyond conventional dashboards
• Experience creating or evolving a design system and its corresponding component library
• Experience using AI-assisted design and development tools to accelerate exploration, prototyping, and implementation, with the judgment to evaluate, refine, and take responsibility for the result
• Experience working in an early-stage product environment with evolving requirements and close contact with users
• Background in or exposure to computational biology, bioinformatics, biodefense, or national security

If there is a fit, we will schedule behavioral and technical interviews. The final step is an onsite in our office, where you will work on a small project, discuss ideas, and work with the wider team.