Founding Product Designer

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.