Design Engineer

Applied Compute; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation and equity

Generous health benefits

Unlimited PTO

Paid parental leave

Daily lunches and dinners

Transportation and relocation support

Retirement plans

Job summary

Applied Compute in San Francisco is seeking a design engineer who blends design thinking with engineering to shape the product experience. You will craft interfaces for building evals, training models, and monitoring live agents, while also shaping the platform’s public visuals and GTM materials.

You’ll collaborate with the founding team to prototype, implement, and refine surfaces that sit atop research and infrastructure, ensuring consistency across product, website, and collateral.

Qualifications

• Strong front-end or design engineering skills (TypeScript, React, CSS, animations).
• Experience building polished, production user interfaces.
• Strong product taste and clear opinions about what makes software feel great.

Responsibilities

• Build production-quality UI components and interactions that make complex training, evaluation, and agent workflows feel delightful.
• Own the quality of UI implementation across the platform.
• Build the visualization and developer experience surfaces that help customers understand, debug, and trust continually improving models.
• Extend the product's design language to our website and public presence, building and polishing the pages where customers first meet Applied Compute.
• Translate the platform experience into sales collateral, from product demos and visuals to the decks and assets the GTM team takes to market.
• Contribute to design systems and component libraries that keep the product, website, and collateral consistent and let the team ship faster.

Skills

TypeScript

React

CSS

Animations

Front-end development

Job description

The role

We're looking for a design engineer who lives at the intersection of design and code. You'll craft the product experience that makes Specific Intelligence legible and intuitive. This includes the interfaces where customers build custom evals, train models, watch agents improve with use, and trust what they're shipping into production. The same craft extends outward, to how the platform shows up publicly across GTM efforts.

You'll work directly with the founding team to prototype, build, and polish the surfaces that sit on top of our research and infrastructure. This is a role for someone who thinks like a designer but builds like an engineer. You'll help define the visual language, interaction patterns, and product philosophy.

What you'll do

• Build production-quality UI components and interactions that make complex training, evaluation, and agent workflows feel delightful


• Own the quality of UI implementation across the platform


• Build the visualization and developer experience surfaces that help customers understand, debug, and trust continually improving models


• Extend the product's design language to our website and public presence, building and polishing the pages where customers first meet Applied Compute


• Translate the platform experience into sales collateral, from product demos and visuals to the decks and assets the GTM team takes to market


• Contribute to design systems and component libraries that keep the product, website, and collateral consistent and let the team ship faster

What we're looking for

• Strong front-end or design engineering skills (TypeScript, React, CSS, animations)


• Experience building polished, production user interfaces


• Strong product taste and clear opinions about what makes software feel great


• Ability to move fast, prototyping ideas in hours, not days


• Systems thinking: you build reusable, maintainable UI rather than one-off screens


• Comfort in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment, working directly with customers and the founding team

Strong candidates also have

• Experience building data visualization or complex technical UIs


• Experience with observability, debugging, or evaluation interfaces


• Background at high-craft product companies or developer tooling startups


• Experience building AI-powered products or agent systems, and a habit of experimenting with new frameworks for fun


• Experience working closely with designers, or operating as a design-minded engineer

About us

Applied Compute builds Specific Intelligence for the enterprise. We provide the continual learning infrastructure for companies to build agent workforces trained on proprietary data and institutional expertise. Our researchers and platform embed directly within customer environments to build custom evals, train models, and deploy agents that get better with use.

• Why we're excited: We get to work at a rare intersection. Our product team builds the platform powering a new generation of digital coworkers. Our research team pushes the frontier of post-training and reinforcement learning. Our applied AI team sits side-by-side with customers as they ship agents into production. This combination of strong product, deep research, and boots on the ground is what we believe it takes to bring AI to the enterprise. We are product-led, research-enabled, and forward-deployed.


• Who we are: We're a team of engineers, researchers, and operators. Many of us are former founders. We've built RL infrastructure at OpenAI, data foundations at Scale AI, and systems at Together, Two Sigma, Watershed, and others. We work with F50 customers and are fortunate to be backed by partners like Kleiner Perkins, Benchmark, Sequoia, Lux, and Greenoaks.


• Who Thrives Here: We're looking for people who are excited about applying novel research and complex systems to real-world problems. Our team genuinely enjoys working with customers: listening, empathizing, and understanding how work actually gets done in their organizations. Former founders, people who've built a lot of side projects, or anyone who's shown they can own something end-to-end, tend to do well here.

Benefits & Logistics

This role is based in San Francisco. We work from our office in the Mission. We offer:

• Competitive compensation and equity


• Generous health benefits


• Unlimited PTO


• Paid parental leave


• Daily lunches and dinners


• Transportation and relocation support


• Retirement plans

We sponsor visas. While we can't guarantee success for every candidate or role, if you're the right fit, we're committed to working through the process with you. As set forth in Applied Compute's Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.