Founding Design Engineer

London, UK Full-time Founding team

The Role

The relationship between a person and a piece of software is being rewritten in real time. We are looking for a designer who will define the next generation of interaction patterns for intelligent systems.

An extraordinary designer is one of our first hires because design is central to the problem we're solving, not an afterthought. You will own the entire surface area of how owners interact with our system: the grammar of interaction, the architecture, the visual language, and the code that brings it to life.

Your work will sit at the boundary of product, research, and infrastructure. You will transform dense event streams and simulations into views that are beautiful, clear, and immediately useful to busy people running real businesses in the physical world.

What You Will Do

Define the visual language and interaction patterns for an AI-native product from square one
Design and build owner-facing views that make complex business state legible and actionable
Create the information design layer between our intelligence engine and the owners it serves
Ship production code in a modern frontend stack
Collaborate directly with the co-founders to translate product vision into tangible artifacts
Establish the taste bar for everything the user touches

What We Are Looking For

Craft: Your portfolio shows thoughtful information design and genuine aesthetic sensibility — work that reveals clear thinking about the underlying problem. This matters most to us.
Taste: Original thinking and a clear point of view. The designers who will matter most in the years ahead are those who have both.
Systems thinking: You reason about state, sequence, and context, not just layout. You think in systems, not screens.
Building ability: You ship. Side projects, open source, indie products, startup experience — we want evidence of end-to-end execution, not incremental handoffs.
High agency: You do not wait for specifications. You identify the right problem, propose a direction, and build it.
AI native: You have a genuine interest in how AI changes interaction patterns — designing for systems that understand context, well beyond clicks and form fields. Depth here is a bonus, not a prerequisite.

Working Here

Both co-founders are strong writers and sharp critics who care deeply about design and about our customers. What we lack is the ability to rapidly execute and iterate on visual design at the level our products demand.

We are looking for a creative partner who is energized by the challenge of defining something genuinely new. What we can offer: real ownership, an ambitious problem, and co-founders who will push you to do the best work of your career.

Compensation

Competitive salary ($100k–$180k) commensurate with experience. Meaningful equity reflecting a founding-team-level role.

Apply

Send a resume and portfolio to josh@workwithcypress.com