C1 Product Design Engineer at C1.ai who designs and builds product experiences end to end using AI-native toolkits. Works closely with design and product teams to make data-driven design decisions and ship UI in code.
Responsibilities
We're looking for a Design Engineer: someone who lives at the intersection of design thinking and hands-on building. This isn't a traditional design role where you hand off specs to engineering. You'll be designing and shipping, often in the same session, with agentic development as a core part of how you work.
The right person has strong product design instincts but leads with building. You move fluidly between modern design tools and AI coding harnesses (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or whatever you've tuned for yourself), with the balance tipped toward code. You have a sharp sense for why something should exist and how it should work, and you can move from that clarity to a working implementation quickly.
You'll be joining a small, high-output design team where everyone operates with a lot of ownership and autonomy.
Design and build product experiences end to end, from problem framing through working implementation.
Work across a modern, AI-native toolkit every day: agentic coding harnesses, design tools like Paper and Pen.dev, prototyping tools like Claude Design, and MCP integrations that connect them. Use whatever gets you from idea to artifact fastest.
Make design decisions grounded in data. Draw on research and specs from product designers and product managers, and use tools to pull signal from usage, support, and customer feedback yourself, then translate what you find into solutions.
Contribute to and evolve our design system, ensuring consistency and quality as the product surface area grows.
Work directly in code to prototype, validate, and ship UI. Not as a novelty, but as your default mode.
Communicate the why behind design decisions clearly and publicly. We design in the open here.
Collaborate closely with engineering and product to maintain quality at speed.
You'd Be a Great Fit If...
You build things for fun. Side projects, tools, prototypes, experiments: you have a track record of making stuff outside of your day job.
Qualification
You're comfortable navigating ambiguityYou're a clear communicator (writtenExperience with identityFamiliarity with ReactHiring philosophyWe care about both excellence and gritc1Track record of building side projects
Required
You're comfortable navigating ambiguity. You can take a vague problem, frame it clearly, and start building toward an answer.
You understand technical constraints well enough to know when to push for design quality and when to ship the pragmatic solution.
You're a clear communicator (written, verbal, and visual) and you default to sharing work early and often.
You're curious about the frontier of design and AI: how the craft is changing, what new workflows look like, and where the discipline is headed.
Experience with identity, security, or infrastructure products.
Familiarity with React, TypeScript, and modern CSS frameworks.
Experience with code-native design tools like Paper or Pen.dev, or building your own agent workflows and skills.
Hiring philosophy
We care about both excellence and grit. You don’t need to check every single box to apply—if this feels like the kind of place you want to build, we’d like to hear from you.
c1.ai is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.
Preferred
Track record of building side projects, tools, prototypes, experiments
All-in on AI tooling and actively use it to accelerate work
