Design Engineer

Product.ai; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

100% premium coverage for you and your family

Daily catered lunches

Unlimited PTO

Job summary

A forward-thinking technology company in Santa Monica is seeking a Design Engineer to create user-centric web experiences around AI shopping verification. The ideal candidate will excel at designing in code, managing interactive components, and rapidly prototyping solutions. Competitive base salary between $120,000 and $180,000, along with equity ownership and extensive benefits like catered lunches and unlimited PTO. This role emphasizes a hands-on, iterative approach, valuing real-world feedback in the design process.

Qualifications

• Prototypes must be real enough to ship and learn from.
• Expression of taste through engineering is essential.
• Must push early prototypes for feedback and iterate quickly.
• Use AI to accelerate workflow effectively.
• Balance aesthetics and functionality for user trust.

Responsibilities

• Design core web experiences around AI shopping verification.
• Build prototypes rapidly for testing with design teams.
• Manage a living component library for front-end development.
• Inform human-designed interactions with structured data.
• Collaborate within a high-performance studio environment.

Skills

Design in code

Animation timing

Fast shipping and iteration

AI for iteration speed

Product judgment

Tools

React

CSS

Job description

Doing product research online feels harder than ever. AI promised better information. Instead it flooded the web with hallucinations, generated content, and confident-sounding answers that have no idea what's true.

Product.ai is building the truth engine for shopping. When every other AI tool summarizes and guesses, we verify. Not opinions. Not averages. Ground truth.

Self-funded and profitable for over a decade, we're a team of e-commerce veterans who have been building commerce truth systems at scale. Over a billion dollars in annual transaction volume. Millions of customers served. Product.ai is our flagship - the new starting point for shopping in the AI era. We're in early alpha, building alongside our community of domain experts.

We hire selectively and structure for long-term partnership with our builders through co-ownership, empowered culture, and profit sharing.

We are seeking a Design Engineer to own the space between design intent and shipped experience. This is not a front-end developer role where you implement Figma comps. This is a builder who designs in code - someone whose prototypes are real enough to ship, whose taste is strong enough to push back on a mockup, and whose engineering instincts are sharp enough to know when a beautiful interaction will create a performance nightmare. You don't wait for designs to implement. You build experiences that couldn't have been designed in Figma first. At Product.ai, the most important interactions - verification state changes, confidence indicators, real-time claim validation - need to be felt before they can be specified. You're the person who makes them real.

Santa Monica.

What You Will Build

• Consumer Product Experience. The core web experience (smartphones first) with our AI shopping agent at its heart. You'll design AND implement how verification signals become interactions - how state changes feel, how transitions communicate confidence versus uncertainty, how users navigate between hunt mode and validation mode. This is not a standard e-commerce interface. The core interaction is watching an AI verify a product claim in real time and showing you the evidence. The feel of that interaction is the product differentiator. You'll ship it fast, measure it with real users from our Alpha Team, and iterate on the micro-interactions that build trust.
• Interactive Prototyping Pipeline. You'll build the bridge between design exploration and production code. When the design team needs to test a new verification flow, you build a working prototype in hours, not days. When engineering needs to understand a complex interaction, your prototype IS the spec. You'll use AI tools to accelerate iteration - generating component variations, testing responsive behavior, exploring animation curves - so that the team makes design decisions based on real interactions, not static mockups. At Product.ai, the prototype is often the first draft of production code.
• Design System Components. You'll own the living component library that the entire front-end team builds on. Not just visual components - interactive components with real state management, responsive behavior, and accessibility built in. The verification confidence indicator. The real-time claim status animation. The evidence drawer that shows sources. These components need to feel right at every breakpoint, in every state, at every speed. You'll build them once, build them right, and iterate them based on production data.
• Cross-Surface Interaction. Our experience spans web app (human-facing) and agent-native surfaces (JSON-LD, MCP protocol). You'll ensure that interaction patterns designed for human fingers also inform how structured data is organized for AI agents. When a verification state transition feels right to a user clicking through the web app, the underlying data structure needs to carry that same logic to an agent consuming our API. You'll think about information hierarchy and interaction design as two expressions of the same truth.

Who You Are

We don't care about your pedigree. We care about your mechanics.

• You design in code. Your prototypes are real enough to learn from, and often real enough to ship. You don't need mockups to think. You think in React components, CSS transitions, and state machines. You've built interactions that designers looked at and said "I couldn't have specified this" - because the feel only emerged through building. You understand that some design problems can only be solved in the medium they'll ship in.
• You have taste, and you express it through engineering. You care about animation timing. You care about how a 200ms delay between states feels different from a 350ms delay. You care about how a drawer opens, how a confidence score fades in, how a loading state communicates progress without lying about it. You code to express taste, not just to implement specifications. Your PRs include interaction decisions, not just functional code.
• You ship fast and you iterate in public. You don't wait for perfect. You push component prototypes early, get feedback from designers and engineers, and iterate based on what you learn. You know the difference between technical debt and strategic shortcuts - you accumulate the former strategically and avoid the latter. You've shipped interactions that were 80% right, measured the response, and iterated to 95% in production.
• You use AI as a force multiplier for iteration speed. You generate component variations with AI. You test responsive behavior across breakpoints faster because AI handles the mechanical parts. You're clear-eyed about when AI output is generic (most of the time for design-sensitive work) and when it genuinely accelerates your workflow (scaffolding, boilerplate, test coverage). You're not ideological about it. You're practical.
• You have product judgment, not just craft skill. You can distinguish between "this interaction is beautiful" and "this interaction helps the user trust the system." You push back on designs that look good but create poor interactions. You've told a designer that their mockup wouldn't work in practice, and you built the alternative that was better. You care about the user feeling right, not the code looking clever.

Ownership

We operate as a high-performance studio, not a typical corporation. Every builder at Product.ai is a partner, not an employee collecting a paycheck.

• Base: $120,000 - $180,000. Competitive for the role level. Your base covers your life; your ownership builds your freedom.
• Equity: You receive a formal ownership stake via Profits Interest Units (PIUs) - Class B Membership Interests with a $0 strike price. Not options. Not RSUs. Actual ownership that participates in the upside from day one and qualifies for Capital Gains tax treatment.
• Profit Sharing: You participate in the company's annual success. As an equity holder, you receive a pro-rata share of Free Cash Flow (FCF) - real cash, every year, not a promise tied to a future exit.
• Liquidity: We operate an Annual Tender Offer where the company buys back vested interests at fair market value. You can turn ownership into cash every year. No waiting for an IPO. No hoping for an acquisition.
• Benefits: 100% premium coverage for you and your family, daily catered lunches, and unlimited PTO that we actually expect you to use.

How to Apply

We skip the 60-minute recruiter screen. Instead, you'll answer a few short video questions so we can get to know how you think and work. Less time than a phone screen, and you can do it whenever works for you.

The Process:

• Click Apply.
• Record short video responses to our questions (no prep required - we want to see how you naturally think).
• Your responses go directly to the hiring team. No ATS. No keyword parsing.

We're not looking for polished presentations. We're looking for signal on who you are.