Founding Design Engineer

Cypress Labs; Greater London; On-site; GBP 100,000 - 155,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Founding-team equity

High ownership culture

Early design partner access

Job summary

Cypress Labs is building a generational company to enable the future of ownership, where owners interact with an AI-native platform that makes complex business operations legible. You will shape the visual language and the user experience across the system, turning dense event streams into clear, actionable views for busy founders.

Join a small, high-ambition team in London and ship production frontend code, establishing the taste bar for every touchpoint as we redefine how owners interact with

Qualifications

• Significant product design experience with high craft and tempo.
• Portfolio showing clear thinking about underlying problems.
• Fluency shipping in a modern frontend stack; eagerness to learn new tech.
• Systems thinking: state, sequence, context beyond layout.
• Genuine interest in how AI rewrites interfaces.
• High agency: identify problems, propose directions, build them.

Responsibilities

• 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 operations legible and actionable.
• Create the information design layer between our intelligence engine and owners it serves.
• Ship production code in a modern frontend stack.
• Establish the taste bar for everything the user touches.

Skills

Product design

Portfolio excellence

Frontend shipping

Systems thinking

AI interface design

Proactivity

Job description

Cypress

Running a business today means operating in one world and understanding in another. The owner lives in a stream of real-world events — deliveries, staffing, inventory, customers — context-switching into spreadsheets, dashboards, and reports to make sense of the data. These two realities never quite line up. Cypress collapses the distance between business reality and understanding.

We are building a generational company to enable the future of ownership. Our platform continuously models a business as it runs, constructing a living representation that agents can act on and owners can collaborate with. The result is something that hasn’t existed before: businesses that understand themselves. This changes who can own a business, how those businesses are operated, and how far they can go.

Cypress Labs is backed by top-tier venture capital and a roster of angel investors with operational expertise. Founded by Spencer Wilson (MIT, Marshall Scholar, UCL neuroscience PhD, previously Ctrl-Labs and Trisk Bio) and Josh Hone (first commercial hire at bootstrapped Quorum, COO at venture-backed Column).

We’re working in person in London.

The Role

An extraordinary designer is one of our first hires because design is central to the problem we’re solving. You will own the entire surface area of how owners interact with our system: the grammar of interaction, the visual language, and the code that brings it to life.

Your work sits 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 patterns of interaction for an AI-native product from square one

• Design and build owner-facing views that make complex business operations 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

• Establish the taste bar for everything the user touches

You Bring

• Significant product design experience at organizations where craft and tempo are taken seriously. You know what excellence looks like, your bar is high. NB: we are open to a broad range of experience levels if your work speaks for itself and we see clear indications of high learning rate.

• A portfolio that reveals clear thinking about the underlying problem, not just beautifully arranged pixels.

• Fluency shipping in a modern frontend stack, and a desire to learn new technologies as needed.

• Systems thinking. You reason about state, sequence, and context, not just layout.

• Genuine interest in how AI rewrites the rules of interfaces.

• High agency. You identify the right problem, propose a direction, and build it.

Why Us

• Design engineers almost never get founding-team equity. Most join after the product language is already written. Cypress is an opportunity to invent new modes of interaction for intelligent systems before the conventions are set.

• Our team will stay small, and our ambitions will stay big. We aim for a high revenue-to-headcount ratio and a high-trust, high-ownership culture.

• Both co-founders are strong writers and thought partners who care deeply about design and about our customers. What we need is the ability to rapidly execute and iterate on visual design at the level our products demand. You’ll be the key creative partner we’re building with.

• Backed by a top-tier venture firm and an angel roster of experienced operators. Product is already working with early design partners.

Compensation

£100k to £155k base, depending on experience. Meaningful equity reflecting a founding role.

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