Founding Design Engineer

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

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.