Founding Design Engineer

Role: Founding Design Engineer

Location: Bengaluru

About the Role

We are hiring our first design engineer. Our engineers have built a powerful product engine. It works. It solves real problems. Now we need someone to build the cockpit. We have strong product-market validation and an engineering-led culture; this role marks the next phase of intentional design investment. You will inherit a product engineered for depth, functionality, and performanceand elevate it into a cohesive, elegant, and world-class user experience. You will define our design culture, establish our design systems, and set the standard for how product decisions get made going forward.

This is a high-autonomy role. There is no existing design team. No creative director. No established system. You will be operating on a blank canvas, with full ownership and responsibility.

If you are excited by ambiguity, systems thinking, and long-term product craft, this role is for you.

What You Will Own

1. Design System Architecture

• Evolve our existing UI foundation into a scalable, unified design system.
• Define typography, spacing, color, layout grids, interaction patterns, and motion standards.
• Create and maintain structured documentation in Figma (components, usage guidelines, interaction patterns).
• Establish systematic thinking, not just visual polish.

2. End-to-End Design & Implementation

This is not a handoff role.

• Design high-fidelity flows and interfaces in Figma.
• Translate them into clean, reusable React components.
• Leverage Figmas developer tools and MCP server to accelerate the design-to-code loop.
• Build and maintain Storybook for visual component QA and documentation.
• Ensure that what ships in production faithfully reflects the intent and detail of the design system.

You will not be writing backend logic, but you will own the last mile of the user interface.

3. Product & UX Leadership

• Move fluidly between high-level product strategy and low-level implementation details.
• Think deeply about edge cases, usability, accessibility, and micro-interactions.
• Partner closely with engineering and product to shape roadmap decisions.
• Establish the principles and processes by which design decisions are made across the company.

Required Skills & Experience

• 37 years of experience in product design or UX/UI design roles.
• Strong portfolio demonstrating shipped product work and system-level thinking.
• Ability to operate independently in ambiguous environments.
• Experience evolving organically built UI into structured, scalable design systems.
• Comfort implementing UI components in React with Tailwind.
• Experience working with Git/GitHub workflows (Pull Requests, reviews, collaborating inside codebases).
• Ability to move between product strategy discussions and CSS-level implementation detail.
• Strong systematic thinking (tools matter less than structure).

Nice to Have

• Experience working on multi-surface products (Web + Extension/Add-in + Mobile).
• Familiarity with accessibility standards (WCAG).
• Experience setting up Storybook or equivalent component documentation tooling.
• Proficiency with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) to accelerate design-to-implementation workflows.
• Startup experience in early-stage product environments.