Founding Design Engineer

The work

BotBot uses structured company context in plain files and Git to steer agent work. Typed checks and human review make the work inspectable, and the interface has to make that workflow understandable to the people directing it.

The role

We're hiring a founding design engineer to own the experience of BotBot and the system we run the company on.

This is a designer's role with an engineer's output. You will set the interaction and visual direction, prototype it in the product, and carry it through to production code with AI tools. You will work alongside the founding engineer on the system boundaries that shape the experience.

The scope grows with the person. What does not change is the expectation that you can turn a rough goal into a considered, reviewed result.

What you'll work on

• design and build the interfaces for starting, steering, reviewing, and approving agent work
• make company context, agent state, checks, and review history understandable through clear interaction patterns and visual hierarchy
• build reusable components and patterns for dense operational information without sanding away the details that make an experience clear
• turn ambitious visual references into working product, identifying which details create the effect and finding the fastest credible way to reproduce them
• create fast design-feedback loops using generated variants, browser automation, screenshots, comparative review, and user feedback
• ship your designs as production code, with agents doing the heavy lifting and your judgment doing the review

You will also improve the system you design with: capture interface standards in writing, build visual checks that make fast iteration safer, and turn repeated judgment calls into reusable patterns.

How you operate

You move between research, interaction exploration, visual design, and implementation without waiting for a handoff. When a flow is unclear, you prototype it rather than argue about it in the abstract.

You keep useful work in motion. While one variant renders or one implementation runs, you prepare the next comparison, capture a real state, or refine a pattern. Ordinary ambiguity does not stop you, but consequential decisions get surfaced early.

Technical and design foundations

Useful experience includes some combination of:

• interaction design, design systems, data-dense interfaces, or developer tools
• interfaces for agent oversight, review workflows, or other new interaction models
• typography, layout, motion, and the craft details of high-end product interfaces
• TypeScript, React, or another modern frontend stack; CSS, responsive interfaces, component systems, and application state
• prototyping in code, browser automation, and visual regression testing

You do not need all of these. We care about visible design judgment, the ability to implement what you design, and evidence that you can use agents to move faster without lowering the quality bar.

Strong evidence

Show us an interface you both designed and shipped. We want to understand how you moved from a rough goal to explored variants to the shipped state, and how you checked the result. A portfolio matters here, as does the system behind it: how you create options, choose, and make your judgment reusable.

Working relationship

You will work alongside the founding engineer and report to Michael. Both roles are expected to improve the system of work alongside the product work.

Location

San Francisco is strongly preferred. We want to work together in person and build shared context quickly during this stage of the company. We will consider an exceptional remote candidate with strong evidence of independent work and excellent written communication.

How we work

We build with shared structured context, spec-driven development, flights of agent work, automated verification, and human review at the decisions that matter.