Design Engineer

Focus Tiger; Helsinki; Hybrid; EUR 33,000 - 56,000; Full time

Job summary

Focus Tiger is looking for its first designer to shape the product’s look and feel and ship the UI as working code in front of customers. You’ll own the UI from rough idea to live feature, and after launch you’ll watch how people use it and iterate based on feedback.

This role suits a builder with a design eye and comfort using AI coding tools. You’ll have room to shape direction, make design calls, and explain them to the team.

Qualifications

• At least a couple of years of professional experience designing or building digital products.
• Comfort building UI with AI coding tools, and the drive to get much better at it quickly.
• Ownership: you pick up an unclear problem and move it forward without waiting for a spec.

Responsibilities

• Design and ship UI using AI-powered tools.
• Collaborate with CTO, CPO and Product Engineer to shape product direction.
• Create landing pages or marketing materials as needed.

Skills

UI design

Frontend development

AI-assisted UI

Tools

Next.js

Python

FastAPI

Job description

As our first designer, you'll shape how Focus Tiger looks and feels, and you'll build it too. You might be a designer who builds with AI, or a frontend developer with a strong design eye. Either way, you'll take a rough idea, work out what it should be, and ship the UI yourself as working code in front of customers. After launch it stays yours: you watch how people use it, listen to feedback and keep polishing as you learn what works.

This role needs a builder mindset: you get energy from making things real and putting them in people's hands early. You'll have a lot of room to shape things your way, and you should be confident making design calls on your own and explaining them to the team.

About Focus Tiger

Focus Tiger is an award-winning, neuroscience-based app, built on University of Helsinki research, that helps individuals and teams build stronger focus habits, protect their mental health, and get more done, through short daily lessons and mini-tools delivered via Slack and Teams, backed by an organizational dashboard. We're five years old, bootstrapped, and have been profitable since year one. In 2025, we had over €1M in sales, with real ambitions to grow much bigger from here.

Read more about the product at https://focustiger.io/product, or try it yourself with a free trial at https://app.focustiger.io/signup.

You'll join a product team of three: our CTO, our CPO and a Product Engineer. Between us we have experience building products for millions of users at companies like Wolt and Yousician. You'll work closely with all three, and they'll count on you for design.

How we build

We use AI heavily. Almost all of our code is written by AI under human direction, and that's what makes this role possible: one person can go from idea to shipped UI. In practice:

• You design in the real medium. You think through states, edge cases, empty and error screens, different screen sizes, and what happens with real data.
• You have taste and can explain it. You can tell when AI-generated UI is generic or wrong.
• You review what you build with a critical eye.

Stack

Our web app is built with Next.js, and the backend is Python and FastAPI. You don't need prior experience with either. If you're comfortable building UI with AI, you'll pick up the rest on the job.

What you'll work on

Mostly our product, but we're a startup, so the role gets wider when it needs to. That can mean talking to customers, testing ideas with users, crafting landing pages or other marketing materials.

What we're looking for

• At least a couple of years of professional experience designing or building digital products.
• Comfort building UI with AI coding tools, and the drive to get much better at it quickly.
• Ownership: you pick up an unclear problem and move it forward without waiting for a spec.

You'll probably feel most at home here if you're genuinely curious about focus, attention, and how people work best: it's the whole problem we're building for.

We're a startup. We change direction quickly when we learn something new, and we iterate fast instead of planning everything up front. If you need a stable, fully specced backlog to do your best work, this isn't the place.

Compensation & logistics

€3,000–5,000/month gross depending on experience, with the possibility of stock options. Full-time. We work hybrid, one to two days a week at our office at Maria01 Startup Hub, so you'll need to already be based near Helsinki. We don't offer visa sponsorship or relocation support. Working language is English.