Founding Design Engineer

Usecardboard; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 1,500,000 - 2,500,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and equity

Unlimited tokens across AI models

Healthy budget for AI tools and peripherals

Job summary

Usecardboard is seeking a Founding Design Engineer who will shape the interactions and animations of their innovative video editing platform. Working closely with a talented team, you’ll be responsible for building reusable components and enhancing user experiences across various product features.

The role requires expertise in animation techniques, with a focus on tools like GSAP and Three.js. Not only will you work on core features, but you'll also experiment with new interaction patterns to ensure the product feels dynamic and engaging.

This role offers a competitive salary, founding-team equity, and access to unlimited AI tools to support your creative work.

Qualifications

• Deep knowledge of easing and timing, opinions about animation speeds.
• Fluent in GSAP, Framer Motion, Three.js, comfortable with shaders.
• Solid understanding of WebGL and GLSL.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship interactions, animations, and core rendering engine work.
• Work across product features like the editor timeline and polished elements.
• Experiment with new interaction patterns and creative techniques.
• Write design documentation and set interface guidelines.

Skills

GSAP

Framer Motion

Three.js

WebGL

GLSL

SVG animation performance

Job description

• We’re building the future of storytelling and video editing.
• We’re a small team that moves fast and builds things we’re proud of.
• We care obsessively about taste: in design, in product, in every detail.
• We’re backed by a Tier‑1 global fund, YC, and founders of billion‑dollar companies.

Video is the most powerful way humans tell stories. It always has been. But creating it today is still painfully hard. Fragmented tools, steep learning curves, and workflows that get in the way of the actual creative work. We’re building Cardboard to change that.

In a product like ours, how things move, respond, and feel is not a finishing touch. It’s the product. We’re hiring a Founding Design Engineer who lives at that intersection: someone who can author the feel of Cardboard, not just implement it.

You’ll be working alongside a team of engineers who all care deeply about craft, including the founders. The surface is where you’ll shine. You know enough full stack to hook things up when you need to, but interactions, animations, and the details that make a product feel alive are what you’re here for.

What you’ll actually do

• Build and ship the interactions, animations, micro‑interactions, and core rendering engine work that powers Cardboard.
• Work across core product features like the editor timeline, end‑to‑end microsites, micro‑apps, and polished elements across our marketing and blog.
• Build reusable components and push the quality bar for everything that touches the surface, while respecting the user’s device constraints.
• Experiment with new interaction patterns, shaders, and creative techniques. Ship the ones that make the product feel more alive.
• Write great design.md files. Set interface guidelines for the team and our agents in the spirit of interfaces.rauno.me. Raise our accessibility standards.
• Wire up API endpoints when the work demands it.
• You have deep knowledge of easing and timing. Ease‑out, ease‑in‑out, linear: you know when and why. You have opinions about 80 ms vs 300 ms.
• You’re fluent in GSAP, Framer Motion, and Three.js. You’re comfortable with shaders, dither effects, and SVG animation performance.
• You’re solid in WebGL and GLSL. You understand rendering pipelines from the inside, not just as an API.
• Bonus: you’re excited about WebGPU and where it’s going.

What you get

You’d be surrounded by people who are absurdly good at what they do. One started coding at 11 and shipped an app with 6M+ downloads in high school. One got into CS engineering at 14 and has been working on distributed systems for 8+ years. One’s an ex‑founder who took a company to 1.2M users and $300M+ in transactions. That’s the team. We’re looking for someone who’ll raise the bar on technical craftsmanship and creative product quality. Apart from that you’ll get:

• Competitive salary and founding‑team equity.
• Unlimited tokens across every AI model. Use whatever you want, as much as you want.
• A healthy budget for AI tools and any peripherals you need to do your best work.