Design Engineer New York City

Kyahq; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 100,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive cash & equity compensation

Health & dental insurance

Lunch & dinner

In-person energy

Job summary

Kya is seeking a founding Design Engineer to own how the product looks and feels, bridging design and frontend and shipping interfaces users love. You’ll work directly with the founders in a fast-moving, high-craft environment.

You’ll define interaction patterns for human-agent collaboration, shape the design system, and prototype aggressively to prove ideas before shipping. This role rewards hands-on builders who care about performance and aesthetics.

Qualifications

• Strong frontend skills: React, TypeScript, and modern CSS with performance awareness.
• Bias toward shipping and iterating fast, with good judgment on when to ship.
• Hands-on builder who can take ideas from concept to shipped UI without heavy handoffs.

Responsibilities

• Design and build product end to end, from interaction and visual design through to production frontend code.
• Invent patterns for human-agent collaboration: how work is surfaced, reviewed, and approved.
• Build and own the design system and component library to keep the product fast and cohesive as it grows.
• Prototype quickly to pressure-test ideas, then turn successful ones into polished features.
• Care about motion, latency, empty states, and the small moments that make software feel alive.
• Use Kya to build Kya, and translate learnings into a better product.

Skills

React

TypeScript

CSS

Frontend development

Design systems

Tools

Figma

Cursor

Claude Code

Codex

Job description

About Kya

Kya is your customer success agent. We build AI agents that onboard, activate, and expand customer accounts while teams focus on the relationships, turning customer success into an operating system for growth. We're an agent-native company with a high bar for everything, and we believe a job was never meant to be the busywork. It was meant to be the thinking and the building. The product is where that belief becomes real, so the bar for craft, taste, and speed is high.

The role

You'll own how Kya looks and feels. As a founding Design Engineer you'll live in the space between design and frontend: turning rough ideas into interfaces people love to use, and shipping them yourself. Kya is a new surface, where people and agents work side by side, so there's no playbook to copy. You'll define the interaction patterns for things that don't have conventions yet: how an agent shows its work, where a human steps in to approve, how trust gets built one screen at a time. You'll work directly with the founders, move from idea to shipped UI in days, and set the craft bar for everyone who comes after you.

What you'll do

• Design and build product end to end, from interaction and visual design through to production frontend code.
• Invent the patterns for human and agent collaboration: how work gets surfaced, reviewed, approved, and handed back.
• Build and own the design system and component library so the product stays fast, consistent, and beautiful as it grows.
• Prototype quickly to pressure-test ideas, then turn the ones that work into polished, shipped features.
• Care about the details that matter: motion, latency, empty states, and the small moments that make software feel alive.
• Use Kya to build Kya, and turn what you learn into a better product.

What we’re looking for

• A builder who designs and a designer who builds. You can take a problem from blank canvas to shipped UI without a handoff.
• Strong frontend skills: React, TypeScript, and modern CSS, with an eye for performance.
• Exceptional product sense and taste. You sweat the details and you know why a feature should exist before you build it.
• A bias toward shipping and iterating fast, with the judgment to know when something is good enough and when it isn’t.
• Genuine excitement about agents, and about being early at a company building them.

Nice to have

• Experience as an early or founding designer or engineer at a startup.
• Exceptional taste
• Heavy use of AI design and coding tools (Figma, Cursor, Claude Code, Codex)
• Experience building and maintaining a design system from scratch.
• Work, side projects, or shipped products you can show us.

Benefits

• Competitive cash & equity compensation
• Health & dental insurance
• Lunch & dinner
• In-person energy