Founding Design Engineer
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Overview
Job Description
About the Role
Design engineer who owns the full visual and interactive experience of Jinba's platform. You'll build our design system from the ground up, create motion that makes complex workflows feel intuitive, and ship production code alongside the engineering team. This is a founding design role for someone who wants to shape how enterprise users interact with AI-native software.
Responsibilities
Design and build Jinba's design system: components, tokens, patterns, and documentation
Own UI/UX for core product surfaces, from concept through implementation
Create motion design that guides users through workflow creation and execution
Write clean, maintainable frontend code (we use shadcn/ui and modern React patterns)
Collaborate directly with engineering to ship features, not just hand off specs
Establish design processes and standards as the first dedicated design hire
Requirements
Design Skills
Strong product design sense with portfolio showing end-to-end ownership
Experience building or significantly contributing to a design system
Motion design ability: you understand timing, easing, and how animation communicates state
Technical Ability
Proficient in React/TypeScript; you ship your own designs
Familiar with component libraries like shadcn/ui, Radix, or similar
Understanding of design tokens, CSS architecture, and scalable frontend patterns
Product Context
Experience with developer tools, no-code platforms, or workflow/automation products
Comfort designing complex interfaces: canvas editors, drag-and-drop builders, multi-step flows
Ability to simplify dense functionality without dumbing it down
Strong Signals
Design engineer or founding designer roles at early-stage startups
Experience at companies like Figma, Linear, Notion, Retool, Vercel, or similar dev/productivity tools
Built a design system from scratch at a growing company
Background combining design and engineering
Mindset
Generalist: you'd rather own the whole surface than perfect one component forever
Opinionated but collaborative: you have strong taste and can articulate why
Early-stage ready: you're excited by ambiguity and building foundations others will use
About Jinba
We help large enterprises build automated workflows using plain English. Unlike traditional no-code tools that bolt a chat agent onto their interface, Jinba is built as a native vibe coding platform from the ground up.
YC W26. International team across SF and Tokyo. Growing fast with major enterprise contracts.
Automate your job search with Sonara.
Submit 10x as many applications with less effort than one manual application.
