Founding Design Engineer

We are looking for a Founding Design Engineer to own the quality bar of the Chainloop product experience. This is a foundational role: you will define what “great” looks like for our frontend and encode that judgment into the design system, abstractions, and standards that every engineer and every AI agent builds with, in the spirit of the design engineering teams at Vercel and Linear.

Our vision is to build a platform that allows customers to gather, secure, and contextualize all their SDLC data, empowering them to make informed decisions. Enterprises trust us with their most critical security and compliance workflows, and that trust starts with a product that looks and feels polished.

You are a hands-on builder. You will design and implement frontend features yourself, working with product to shape features that delight customers. But your impact goes beyond your own code: AI agents and product engineers write a large share of our frontend, and you are the enabler who makes their work excellent. You own the quality bar, and you turn every review finding into a component, a guideline, or an agent instruction so it never happens again.

What We’re Looking For

• Senior Design Engineering Experience: 7+ years across frontend engineering and UI craft. Deep, hands-on fluency with React, TypeScript, and modern CSS. You have built polished products end to end.
• A Critical Eye: An opinionated point of view on what good UI and UX look like, including accessibility, responsiveness, and perceived performance. You notice the inconsistent empty state or the flow that takes too many clicks, and you can explain why it matters.
• Design Systems & Abstractions Ownership: Proven experience owning a design system or frontend architecture: deciding when a pattern becomes a component, when an abstraction is wrong, and how to keep a growing codebase coherent.
• AI-Native Workflow: You are fluent driving AI coding agents and have strong opinions on how to make them produce excellent frontend code: guidelines, reusable skills, review loops, and well-designed abstractions.
• Product Sense: You enjoy working directly with product and design to shape features from the start, and you judge your work by the customer’s experience rather than by tickets closed.
• High-Impact Communicator: You can explain why something feels off in terms engineers and agents can act on, with professional English fluency and excellent async writing.

Dos (The Actions We Expect)

• DO design and build. Implement frontend features end to end, working with product to shape them from the earliest stage. Your own work sets the reference implementation for everyone else.
• DO own the quality bar. You are the final word on whether a UI change meets our standard. Say no when something isn’t ready. Every review comment you make twice is a failure of the system: convert your judgment into components, lint rules, and agent skills.
• DO be the gateway for AI best practices. Author the guidelines, prompts, and skills that AI agents and developers follow, and keep the component library and frontend architecture coherent as the product grows. When agents produce something off, fix the standard, not just the diff.
• DO coach and multiply. Raise every engineer’s design sensibility through reviews, pairing, and documentation, and enable the whole team to contribute quality frontend work.

Key Attributes for Success

To succeed in this role, you should embody the following traits:

1. A Clear Point of View: You know what good UI looks like and can defend it with concrete reasons.
2. Enabler & Standards Builder: You make the whole team, humans and AI agents alike, better at frontend by fixing classes of problems through components, rules, and agent skills rather than one review comment at a time.
3. Extreme Ownership & Bias for Action: You feel total responsibility for the product experience; if something looks or feels wrong, you own it until it is fixed at the root.
4. Clarity, Communication & Async Discipline: You create clarity from ambiguity and communicate crisp, actionable feedback in an async-first culture.
5. AI-Native, High-Leverage Engineer: You invest in making AI agents produce excellent work, constantly increasing throughput and quality with leverage, not hours.
6. High-Growth Mindset: You learn fast, absorb feedback without defensiveness, and thrive in early-stage ambiguity with a mission-first mindset.

Why You’ll Love Working With Us

• Foundational Impact: Be one of the very first engineers, directly shaping the product, technology, and culture of an early-stage company. Your work will be critical to our success.
• Mission-Driven Work: Contribute directly to our mission: helping companies build and ship trusted software faster.
• Cutting-Edge Technology: Work with modern technologies like Go, Kubernetes, cloud-native tools, and explore applications of AI. You’ll be at the forefront of innovation in the DevSecOps space.
• Remote-First: We are a distributed team, offering you the flexibility to work from anywhere.
• Competitive Salary, Equity, and Benefits: We offer a competitive compensation package, including meaningful equity.

Ready for the challenge? Then let’s talk!