Design Engineer New York City

Meetkay; New York, Northern (NY, KY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Meaningful equity

Job summary

YakLabs in New York City is seeking a frontend designer who designs in code and ships a polished, scalable UI for ambitious AI workflows.

You’ll own the design system, define interaction patterns from onboarding to daily use, and craft progressive disclosure that makes power accessible without intimidation. This founding-team role emphasizes ownership and high impact, with meaningful equity.

Qualifications

• First principles thinking applied to product problems in real time.
• Strong ownership with end-to-end accountability.
• Curiosity about AI tooling and evolving agent-based workflows.
• Ability to build scalable systems that multiply team impact.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the UI end to end, from onboarding to daily use.
• Define interaction patterns that gracefully scale in complexity.
• Own the design system: components, motion, micro-interactions, visual language.

Skills

First principles thinking

High agency and ownership

Deep curiosity about AI tooling

Build compounding leverage

Tools

Figma

Job description

YakLabs is building a desktop AI application that turns knowledge workers into AI power users, without docs, API keys, or knowing what to ask for. One surface for agentic AI work: proactive, personalized, progressively powerful. The gap between AI power users and everyone else isn’t talent, it’s setup. We close it.

The team: Alex Goddijn spent four years at Palantir, then founded an agent harness company that was acquired by Poolside AI. Seb Goddijn led internal AI at Ramp. We’re building Kay so that kind of leverage isn’t limited to companies with their own internal AI team.

We have funding. Product and design work in person in New York City, and some engineering roles are remote. Small team, high intensity, no passengers.

The job

You own how the product looks, feels, and moves. This isn’t a “make mockups and hand them off” role: you design in code. Our wedge is making complex AI workflows feel effortless, and that lives or dies on interaction design: scalable UI, coherent design systems, and progressive disclosure that keeps power accessible without making it intimidating.

Problems you’ll work on

These are examples, not lanes. You will move between them, while taking real ownership of the ones that match your interests.

• Making agent work legible: Someone needs to see what an agent did, what it is doing now, and what it is about to do, across parallel work they did not watch happen. Show too little and they cannot trust it. Show too much and they drown.
• A design system agents can build with: Agents and plugins can create new surfaces faster than a small team can review them. How do you encode enough interaction and visual judgment into the system that the product can grow without losing coherence?
• An agent that sounds right: How should an agent’s voice and personality be shaped by the person using it, and how does everything it writes on their behalf come out in their voice rather than a generic one?

What you’ll do

• Design and build the UI end to end, from first-run onboarding to the surfaces people use daily.
• Create the interaction patterns that make progressive complexity feel natural. Day 1 is simple. Day 30 has serious depth, and it still feels simple.
• Own the design system: components, motion, micro-interactions, and the visual language that ties it all together. Set the quality bar for every pixel that ships.
• Build scalable UI patterns that hold up as the product grows: surfaces that extend without breaking, complexity that compounds without becoming chaos.
• Prototype fast. Many of the most important UX questions (how to surface proactive suggestions, how to make agent actions legible, how to keep power accessible without making it intimidating) are unsolved. You’ll explore the space and converge on what works.

Who you are

• You design in code. Figma is fine for exploration, but your deliverable is a working component, not a spec.
• You can build a polished, scalable UI without waiting for someone to hand you wireframes. Strong frontend skills are table stakes.
• You have a deep feel for interaction design: timing, hierarchy, progressive disclosure. You have taste and you can defend it.
• You have deep empathy for users. You understand how a non-technical knowledge worker experiences the product, and you design for them, not for yourself.
• You know what good AI UX feels like from the inside, because you’ve been working with and building these tools already. You have opinions about what works and what doesn’t, earned from real use.
• You’re comfortable with ambiguity. The design language doesn’t exist yet. You’ll create it.

Bonus

• You’ve designed for desktop apps (the constraints are different from web).
• You’ve shipped a product where the design was the moat.

Who we look for

These apply to every role at YakLabs.

• First principles thinking. We’re building in a category that’s being defined in real time. Best practices don’t exist yet. You reason from the problem, not from what everyone else is doing.
• High agency and ownership. You don’t wait to be told what to do. You see what needs to happen, you go make it happen, and you own the outcome. At a team this size, there’s nobody to delegate to.
• Deep curiosity about AI tooling. Not just using ChatGPT or Copilot: you’re experimenting, writing your own tools, trying new agent frameworks the week they drop, forming opinions about what works and what doesn’t. The people building this product should be the most demanding users of the category.
• You build compounding leverage. In the era of building with agents, one person doesn’t just ship one person’s work, they build the systems that build the product. Every person is amplified, and with that amplification comes the responsibility to build things that compound: skills, automations, agent workflows that make the next thing faster. This is a new way of working, and you’re excited to develop the skillset it demands.

The deal

• Early team, meaningful equity.
• In person in New York City for product and design roles. Some engineering roles are remote, and each posting lists its location.
• You’ll shape the product, the culture, and the company. This is a founding-team role.

How we hire

YakLabs is an equal opportunity employer. We consider every application withoutregard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation,national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protectedcharacteristic. If you need an accommodation at any point in the process, email [e-mail] and we will work it out with you. A person, not a machine,reads every application.