Founding Design Engineer

About BotBot

BotBot helps teams test and improve how voice AI behaves in live customer conversations, and measure the impact on real business outcomes.

The role

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

Our products need interfaces for work that conventional software has never had to expose. A person needs to understand what several agents are doing, see the choices they made, compare results, give direction, and intervene quickly. Designing that experience is the most consequential design problem in the product, and we want the person who owns it to also build it.

This is a designer's role with an engineer's output. You should be as thoughtful about the user experience and what makes a product interface compelling as you are about the aesthetics, and comfortable using AI tools to implement your designs in working code. There is no handoff to engineering, because you are both sides of it.

We are open to the right person at any point in their career. The junior/senior divide is gone on purpose; the expectations below describe how you work, not how long you have worked.

What you'll work on

• design and build the interfaces for starting, steering, reviewing, and approving agent work
• make dense operational information understandable: design systems, interaction patterns, and visual hierarchy for state that has never had a UI before
• design the behavior-design and experiment surfaces where teams shape how their AI acts and read what happened
• 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
• build reusable components and interaction patterns without sanding away the custom details that make an experience good
• 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: capturing interface standards in writing so agents produce closer first drafts, building visual checks that make fast iteration safe, and turning 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 in the product rather than arguing about it in the abstract. When a reference contains a large amount of custom interface work, your response is to understand the cost, identify the highest-value details, and decide how to get as close as possible quickly.

You keep your own queues filled. While one variant renders or one implementation runs, you prepare the next comparison, capture real product states, or refine the pattern that several screens will share. You know when a design decision needs input, but ordinary ambiguity does not stop you.

Who we're looking for

A designer with deep UX and UI experience who has crossed into implementation, or a design-minded engineer whose work shows genuine design depth. The center of gravity is design: we need someone who has spent years thinking about how people understand and operate software, and who now uses AI tools to carry that thinking all the way to shipped code.

You should be equally thoughtful about three layers: the user experience (what the person is trying to do, and whether they can), the product interface (how the product's concepts become controls, states, and flows that feel inevitable), and the aesthetics (whether every detail looks and feels considered). Work that is beautiful but shallow misses, and so does work that is functional but careless.

You already use AI as a normal part of both design and implementation: generating and comparing variants, taking apart references, implementing in code you review rather than write line by line. We want evidence that you can take an interface from a rough goal to a shipped, considered result yourself.

Areas that matter

Useful experience includes some combination of:

• interaction design, design systems, data-dense interfaces, or developer tools
• 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
• designing for AI behavior, agent oversight, or other domains where the interaction model is new

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 signals

The strongest evidence is an interface you both designed and shipped: a product with details you clearly cared about, where you can walk us through how you moved from the goal to explored variants to the shipped state, and how you checked the result. A portfolio matters here, and so does the system behind it: how you create options, how you choose, and how your judgment becomes something reusable.

The exact background matters less than whether you can take a product concept and turn it into an experience people trust and enjoy, without waiting for someone else to design it or someone else to build it.

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 run the company from shared, structured context that people and agents both use. We build with spec-driven development, flights of agent work, automated verification, and human review at the decisions that matter. Everyone here is expected to improve that system alongside the product work.