Founding Design Engineer

About the Role This is a founding-level frontend role at a seed-stage B2B SaaS startup building an AI-native pricing intelligence platform. You'll own the entire frontend design system — tokens, component library, and interface patterns — ensuring everything shipped, whether by humans or AI coding agents, feels like one cohesive product. As the sole bar-raiser for frontend UX, your work directly shapes how enterprise customers experience pricing strategy and deal intelligence. What You'll Do Define and maintain the design token system, shadcn/ui-based component library, and Tailwind conventions across the full product suite. Enforce consistent frontend patterns using React Query, React Hook Form, and Zod so that agent-generated PRs land coherently by default. Audit and own frontend tooling and quality, including Biome configuration, Playwright E2E coverage, and frontend performance. Integrate brand guidelines and WCAG accessibility rules directly into the codebase and lint rules. Translate design intent into component abstractions and tooling guardrails that scale as the team and AI agents ship more UI. Work with AI coding tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) as a first-class part of your daily workflow and help the team integrate them into frontend processes. Shape conversational and streaming UI patterns for the platform's AI-native interfaces. What We're Looking For 5+ years building polished, production product interfaces with a strong portfolio of shipped features. Proven primary ownership of a design system or component library in production (public repo or detailed walkthrough required). Deep expertise in React, strict TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and component primitives such as shadcn/ui and Radix UI. Hands-on experience with AI coding tools in production workflows. Comfort being the sole frontend UX standard-setter across a fast-moving, small team. Nice to have: Experience with non-standard AI interfaces (streaming responses, generative views), conversational/chatbot UIs for B2B users, animation libraries like Framer Motion, or constrained UI environments such as Slack Block Kit or Teams Adaptive Cards. Must be authorized to work in the US — visa sponsorship is not available. Compensation & Benefits Base salary: $180,000 – $220,000 USD annually. Equity participation expected at the founding team level. No visa sponsorship available. Location On-site in San Francisco, CA . This is not a remote role.