Design Engineer

About Lumbra

Lumbra builds the vendor-neutral operating system for agentic AI in high-consequence environments. In our first ten months we won four U.S. Government prime contracts in open competition, every one deploying into classified spaces, and we are live on JWICS. We were selected from a field of more than 200 companies and won, beat two established defense primes head to head, and earned the follow-on now in execution. Lumbra is a team of engineers and operators from the intelligence community, special operations, and frontier AI research, with degrees from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, West Point, and U.S. Army Ranger School and careers built at Palantir, Anduril, Northrop Grumman, Onebrief, JSOC, NSA, and CIA. They have lived this problem from the inside.

About the Role

Nebula is one product serving two very different audiences. For the non-technical operators and analysts, the surface has to stay calm: the answer, the confidence behind it, and the sources, with nothing to fight through. The technical builders need the reverse: full transparency into the agents, tools, traces, and tradeoffs underneath. Within each audience, sub-personas work at a different altitude of detail and tolerate a different information density. We want a Design Engineer who lives between design and code, can hold all of them at once, and owns the design language that serves both without dumbing either one down.

What You’ll Own

• Create and steward the design system and brand architecture that spans both audiences, from the low-density operator surface to the high-transparency builder surface: tokens, themes, light and dark parity, and the component primitives that make opposite surfaces feel like one platform.

• Prototype and ship novel AI interaction patterns: streaming output, tool-call visualization, citation surfacing, confidence indicators, and agent-to-human handoffs.

• Translate product intent into production React and TypeScript, partnering with product, research, and backend engineers to carry a sketch through to a shipped feature without losing fidelity in the handoff.

• Steward information hierarchy in dense analytical surfaces such as knowledge graphs, evaluation dashboards, and workflow visualizations, where the wrong default hides the work and the right one reveals it.

• Hold accessibility and inclusive design (WCAG) as a baseline of the system rather than a cleanup done later.

You’ll Work Alongside

Intelligence officers, MIT engineers, Special Operations veterans, and applied AI engineers from frontier labs like Anthropic and Google. Your work affects national security directly, and you own part of the company early, when it matters.

Required Qualifications

• A portfolio of shipped production work where you owned both the visual expression and the technical execution, in open source, personal projects, or professional products, weighed as craft over job titles

• Fluency across the design-to-code spectrum, having personally managed tokens, themes, and shared component primitives in a production React and TypeScript codebase

• A track record of holding legibility in dense analytical environments (intelligence, financial, scientific, or developer-facing) where complex data needs disciplined hierarchy

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior work on AI and LLM interfaces: streaming display, tool-call visualization, confidence and citation surfacing

• Deep comfort with AI-assisted prototyping and engineering to close the gap between high-fidelity design and shipped code

Must-haves

U.S. citizenship. Clearance-eligible. Based in the National Capital Region or New York City.

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans

• Premiums 100% covered by Lumbra for all employees

• Exceptionally low premiums for spouses and dependents

• Basic life insurance and disability 100% covered for all employees by Lumbra

• Option to purchase additional life insurance available

• Take the time off that you need, when you need it' paid time off, not accrual based

• Generous company holiday calendar including a holiday shutdown in December

• Supportive leave of absence program including time off for military service, medical events, and parental leave

• Full 401(k) retirement plan for all full-time eligible employees

• Company-funded commuter benefits

• Free access to on-site gym at office