Design Engineer New York City

Hirekya; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive cash & equity compensation

Health & dental insurance

Lunch & dinner

In-person energy

Job summary

Kya in New York is seeking a founding Design Engineer who will live between design and frontend, turning rough ideas into interfaces people love to use and shipping them yourself.

You'll define interaction patterns for human-agent collaboration, set the craft bar for the team, and work directly with the founders to move from idea to shipped UI in days while building a product that scales with growth.

Qualifications

• Experience turning rough ideas into shipped UI.
• Strong frontend skills with React/TypeScript.
• Attention to detail in motion and performance.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Skills

React

TypeScript

Modern CSS

Frontend performance

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