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Founding Design Engineer

Oakwell Hampton · oakwellhampton.com
New YorkHybridLead / Manager14+ yrs
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Straight from the company’s own careers site.

The job in short

Founding design engineering.

TypeScriptReactFigmaUX

Details

Found
6 d ago · posted 2026-09-10
Location
New York, NY, US

Full description

Stealth Frontier AI Lab The Hook: Own 1% of a Revolution We are an elite, stealth applied research lab based in Brooklyn, New York, backed by top-tier investors, AI pioneers, and industry leaders. Our mission is to solve one of the hardest, most inspiring problems in AI: computational creativity, and put creative genius in the hands of everyone. We are developing a next-generation AI platform engineered from first principles for advanced computational creativity. This is not another "prompt-to-output" generator; we are building an entirely new interaction layer that lets anyone create, edit, and orchestrate complex multimedia like an expert. Instead of joining a massive tech firm to become a small cog in a large machine, we are offering you the chance to join as a core founding member. As our founders put it: "It is better to own 1% of a revolution than 0.001% of an evolution." The Role: What You'll Do At our lab, design is not a downstream function. It is a core mechanism for shaping the user experience. As our Founding Design Engineer, you will span the entire product lifecycle—working as a hybrid "high-craft" builder who handles visual mockups, interactive prototyping, and writes production-ready front-end code. • Craft UI Systems: Design clean, considered, and visually stunning interfaces for AI-native surfaces, focusing on micro-interactions and motion/hover states. Co-author our design system and component library from scratch. • Define UX Strategy: Help shape and define the interaction patterns of the product. Question defaults to build trust, precision, and collaboration into generative workflows. • High-Fidelity Prototyping: Build interactive prototypes (Figma, code-based, or hybrid) to pressure-test and refine ideas rapidly before committing them to full engineering. • Front-End Engineering: Implement your designs directly into production in React and TypeScript, utilizing AI-assisted coding tools (Claude, Cursor, v0) fluently as part of your daily workflow. • Collaborate Directly with Leadership: Partner directly with the founders and our seasoned design lead (who brings 14+ years of advertising and product ecosystem expertise) in daily critique and shipping cycles. Who You Are (The Specs) We are seeking a rare hybrid candidate who possesses both pixel-level visual sensitivity and rigorous production-level coding discipline: • Production Stack Experience: 2–7 years of experience shipping production-grade front-ends in React and TypeScript. You must have built real, scalable products with them, not just static mockups or prototype-only code. • Visual & Interactive Mastery: A stellar portfolio demonstrating both sides of the coin: strong visual design/UX thinking and shipped code, interactive work, live products, or design system contributions we can actually play with. • Figma Fluency: Deep working mastery of Figma (auto-layout, components, variables, shaders, and prototyping features). Fluency with ancillary tools like Spline, Rive, After Effects, or Framer is a massive plus. • Aesthetic & Creative Taste: A strong eye for typography, motion, grid systems, and detail. You have a genuine interest in creative domains (film, photography, design, writing) and can feel when something is "off" and fix it yourself. • Comfort with Ambiguity: You thrive in an intense, fast-paced startup environment. You prefer shipping and refining rapidly over slow, corporate perfection loops. Nice to Haves: • Experience with WebGL, shader effects, motion design, or generative visual systems. • A background in creative agencies, art-tech startups, or interactive installations. • A side project, plugin, or developer tool that people actually use. Why Join Us? • Real Ownership: On an elite 8-person team, your design decisions are shipped exactly as you made them. No committee approvals, no red tape. • Unbounded Compute: Leverage top-tier GPU clusters and resources to push the limits of what generative AI can do. • Elite Collaborative Culture: Work side-by-side with world-class engineers, researchers, and artists in a high-bandwidth, 100% in-person environment in New York.

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