Summary
✨ AI‑Generated
Become a founding design engineer at a stealth AI research venture developing a new interaction paradigm for computational creativity. You will treat design as a core product function, shape experiences from first principles, and help define how people create, edit, and orchestrate complex multimedia with AI.
Highlights
Founding-level opportunity with substantial ownership and influence over a new AI product. The role offers the chance to shape design from first principles, work closely with an advanced applied research team, and have meaningful impact at an early stage.
Description
Founding Design Engineer — Stealth Frontier AI Lab
The Hook: Own 1% of a Revolution
We are an elite, stealth applied research lab based in Brooklyn, New York, backed by top-tier investors, AI pioneers, and industry leaders.
Our mission is to solve one of the hardest, most inspiring problems in AI: computational creativity, and put creative genius in the hands of everyone.
We are developing a next-generation AI platform engineered from first principles for advanced computational creativity.
This is not another "prompt-to-output" generator; we are building an entirely new interaction layer that lets anyone create, edit, and orchestrate complex multimedia like an expert.
Instead of joining a massive tech firm to become a small cog in a large machine, we are offering you the chance to join as a core founding member.
As our founders put it: "It is better to own 1% of a revolution than 0.001% of an evolution."
The Role: What You'll Do
At our lab, design is not a downstream function.
It is a core mechanism for shaping the user experience.
As our Founding Design Engineer, you will span the entire product lifecycle—working as a hybrid "high-craft" builder who handles visual mockups, interactive prototyping, and writes production-ready front-end code.
Craft UI Systems: Design clean, considered, and visually stunning interfaces for AI-native surfaces, focusing on micro-interactions and motion/hover states.
Co-author our design system and component library from scratch.Define UX Strategy: Help shape and define the interaction patterns of the product.
Question defaults to build trust, precision, and collaboration into generative workflows.High-Fidelity Prototyping: Build interactive prototypes (Figma, code-based, or hybrid) to pressure-test and refine ideas rapidly before committing them to full engineering.Front-End Engineering: Implement your designs directly into production in React and TypeScript, utilizing AI-assisted coding tools (Claude, Cursor, v0) fluently as part of your daily workflow.Collaborate Directly with Leadership: Partner directly with the founders and our seasoned design lead (who brings 14+ years of advertising and product ecosystem expertise) in daily critique and shipping cycles.
Who You Are (The Specs)
We are seeking a rare hybrid candidate who possesses both pixel-level visual sensitivity and rigorous production-level coding discipline:
Production Stack Experience: 2–7 years of experience shipping production-grade front-ends in React and TypeScript.
You must have built real, scalable products with them, not just static mockups or prototype-only code.Visual & Interactive Mastery: A stellar portfolio demonstrating both sides of the coin: strong visual design/UX thinking and shipped code, interactive work, live products, or design system contributions we can actually play with.Figma Fluency: Deep working mastery of Figma (auto-layout, components, variables, shaders, and prototyping features).
Fluency with ancillary tools like Spline, Rive, After Effects, or Framer is a massive plus.Aesthetic & Creative Taste: A strong eye for typography, motion, grid systems, and detail.
You have a genuine interest in creative domains (film, photography, design, writing) and can feel when something is "off" and fix it yourself.Comfort with Ambiguity: You thrive in an intense, fast-paced startup environment.
You prefer shipping and refining rapidly over slow, corporate perfection loops.
Nice to Haves:
Experience with WebGL, shader effects, motion design, or generative visual systems.A background in creative agencies, art-tech startups, or interactive installations.A side project, plugin, or developer tool that people actually use.
Why Join Us?
Real Ownership: On an elite 8-person team, your design decisions are shipped exactly as you made them.
No committee approvals, no red tape.Unbounded Compute: Leverage top-tier GPU clusters and resources to push the limits of what generative AI can do.Elite Collaborative Culture: Work side-by-side with world-class engineers, researchers, and artists in a high-bandwidth, 100% in-person environment in New York.
