Design Research Engineer

Taste Labs; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Taste Labs in San Francisco is looking for a unique design role where design is the product. The ideal candidate will help decode what great design means by collaborating closely with researchers and engineers. If you are curious, have a high bar for quality, and are experienced with AI tools, you might be an excellent fit.

You will be assessing creativity, evaluating visual design, and contributing to a framework for measuring design quality. This role is centered around collaboration, creativity, and AI-driven insights.

Qualifications

• Years of experience honing taste and ability to discern ground truth from personal preference.
• Deep curiosity and research-oriented thinking.
• Familiar with AI tools and code.

Responsibilities

• Decipher what 'great' means in design to inform product development.
• Collaborate with engineering and research teams.
• Develop frameworks to measure design creativity.

Skills

Amazing taste

Collaboration

AI tinkering

Job description

About the company

Taste Labs is building the data and infrastructure layer for taste.

Our goal is to end AI slop. To make AI feel right, not just be correct. We raised $18.5M in seed co‑led by Amplify and CRV, and most frontier labs are already customers.

AI has nailed objective domains and can generate anything. The hard part left is judgement: what fits, what feels like you, what's actually GREAT. We're turning that into something measurable, starting with design.

We do it on two sides: building the post‑training data and RL environments that teach taste to frontier models, and the context and verification tools agents need to produce work that's more creative, more on‑brand, more right.

About the role

This is not a typical design role. At Taste, design is the product. You will help to decode the fuzzy problem of what “great” means in design and have this wisdom feed into interfaces, eval design, and crafting products with our engineering and research teams.

You will spend more of your day in code or with researchers than you will in Figma. If you’re curious, have an absurdly high bar for quality and are AI pilled, this is for you.

Types of questions you’ll be thinking about:

• What is creativity? How do we break down components of creativity?
• What leads to great and bad visual design? How can this be turned into an eval
• What are creative, interesting ways we can collect data
• How do we classify design styles?
• What is the best interface to collect designer feedback on their reasoning behind why they love or hate a particular design?
• What are fundamentals of typography, color, layout, alignment? How do I make this measurable?
• How would I develop a framework around what “great design” means?
• What is AI slop? How can I spot it?

What we’re looking for:

• You have amazing taste. You’ve honed your taste for years, you’re opinionated and have wide references, and you have the ability to separate what’s a personal preference vs. a ground truth
• You are deeply curious and think like a researcher
• You are AI forward - you tinker with AI tools, you’re in claude code/cursor/codex, you ship design in code
• You are great at collaborating with others across design, product, research, engineering, customers
• Bonus: you’ve worked in creative technology companies, research labs or did your own personal projects on the subject.