Founding Design Engineer

Role

Founding Design Engineer responsible for the full visual and interactive experience of Jinba’s platform. You’ll build the design system from the ground up, design core product surfaces, create motion that clarifies complex workflows, and ship production frontend code alongside engineering.

Key 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 (timing, easing, animation) to guide users through workflow creation and execution
• Write clean, maintainable frontend code and collaborate directly with engineering to ship features
• Establish design processes and standards as the first dedicated design hire

Requirements

Design

• Strong product design sense with portfolio showing end-to-end ownership
• Experience building or significantly contributing to a design system
• Motion design ability and understanding of how animation communicates state
• Comfort designing complex interfaces (canvas editors, drag-and-drop builders, multi-step flows)

Technical

• Proficient in React and TypeScript and able to ship your own designs
• Familiarity with component libraries such as shadcn/ui or Radix
• Understanding of design tokens, CSS architecture, and scalable frontend patterns

Product Context & Signals

• Experience with developer tools, no-code platforms, or workflow/automation products is a plus
• Background that combines design and engineering, with prior founding-design or early-stage startup experience favorable
• Examples of working at or building products similar to Figma, Linear, Notion, Retool, or Vercel are strong signals

Compensation

• Compensation Range: $100,000 - $250,000