Design Research Engineer

Tastelabs; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Tastelabs in San Francisco is seeking a Design Researcher who will define the essence of great design and collaborate closely with engineering and research teams. This role is not typical, as it integrates a high degree of coding and research with design.

The ideal candidate possesses a refined taste in design, is inherently curious, and has experience in creative technology. An understanding of AI tools is essential, as this role directly influences Taste Labs' product development.

Qualifications

• Strong ability to differentiate personal taste from objective quality.
• Deep curiosity about creativity and design.
• Familiarity with AI technologies and tools.

Responsibilities

• Help define what makes design great.
• Collaborate with teams to implement design evaluations.
• Engage with researchers on creativity-related questions.

Skills

Taste for design

Curiosity

Collaboration

Research-oriented thinking

Experience with AI tools

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.