Founding Product Designer
Uses AI-assisted design-to-code workflows and aims to move teams beyond 'vibe coding' by building production-ready components and real-time collaborative UX.
About the Role
Tempo is hiring a founding UI/UX Design Engineer in Toronto to lead the design engineering process end-to-end: own product-quality UI, shape the design system, and deliver production-ready React components while collaborating with product, engineering, and AI/ML teams to build AI-assisted, real-time collaborative workflows.
Job Description
Role
Founding UI/UX Design Engineer (Product Designer) responsible for owning the user experience at Tempo. This leadership role requires designing end-to-end interfaces, building production-ready components, driving the design system, and defining AI-assisted design-to-code patterns for a real-time collaborative visual IDE.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead end-to-end UI work from concept, flows, wireframes, and prototypes to production-ready, high-fidelity UI.
- Implement responsive, accessible components in React + TypeScript + Tailwind following Radix/shadcn patterns.
- Collaborate with Product, Engineering, and AI/ML to shape interactions for real-time, multi-user features.
- Drive the design system: tokens, theming, component APIs, and documentation for scalability and consistency.
- Integrate and author AI-assisted design-to-code workflows and agent-safe component patterns.
- Design motion, micro-interactions, and state patterns to improve comprehension and usability.
- Contribute to real-time collaboration UX using Liveblocks/WebSockets, focusing on presence, conflict resolution, and latency.
- Ensure accessibility compliance and performance (Core Web Vitals) and measure UX with meaningful product metrics.
Requirements
- Portfolio with shipped, product-quality UI demonstrating visual design, systems thinking, interaction patterns, accessibility, and measurable product impact.
- Fluency with Figma (flows, prototypes, component props/variants).
- Experience building within a design system (tokens, theming, component APIs).
- Strong grasp of UX principles, interaction design, and accessibility fundamentals.
- Interest in AI-augmented workflows (promptable components, agent-safe patterns).
- Ability to lead by building: deliver production-ready components and drive design vision.
Nice-to-haves
- Hands-on production experience with React, TypeScript, Tailwind, Radix/shadcn.
- Animation and interaction craft (Framer Motion, CSS keyframes, spring physics).
- Real-time collaboration UX experience (CRDTs, optimistic UI, presence patterns).
- Testing and quality tooling (Storybook, Playwright/Jest, accessibility tooling like axe or aria-lint).
- Mobile mindset (Expo/React Native or advanced responsive patterns).
Location & Working Model
- In-office team based in Toronto; this role is an on-site leadership position.
Compensation & Benefits
- Compensation range: CA$125K - CA$200K.
- Competitive salary aligned with impact, equity ownership, in-house lunches 3 days/week, flexible vacation & sick policy, and quarterly team events.