Founding Design Engineer

Kinetic; New York (NY); On-site; USD 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Kinetic in New York is looking for a founding designer to drive the entire frontend experience for their product. This role combines design with product thinking and involves critical tasks such as onboarding, activation, and paywall optimization.

The ideal candidate possesses strong taste in consumer products and has prior experience with AI tools. You will work in a small team that allows for rapid shipping of ideas, making a real impact on how PayMe performs.

Qualifications

• Strong taste in consumer applications.
• Experience in shipping meaningful work.
• Ability to explain design versus implementation.

Responsibilities

• Own the frontend product experience end to end.
• Design and improve key user flows.
• Turn product questions into sharp design hypotheses.

Skills

Strong consumer app taste

Real product thinking

Experience with AI tools

Frontend experience

Ability to design user flows

Job description

What is PayMe

PayMe helps people find and claim money they are already owed. It sits at the intersection of consumer product, trust, conversion, and financial outcomes.

That makes design unusually important. The product has to feel clear, trustworthy, and worth acting on.

What we need

PayMe needs a founding designer who owns the frontend experience end to end. This person should make the product clearer, tighter, more trustworthy, and more worth paying for.

The center of gravity is design. Taste matters more than raw engineering depth. But this cannot be a pure designer. We want someone who has already crossed into shipping real product work, mostly with modern AI tools.

Who you are

• Strong consumer app taste

• Real product thinking

• Meaningful shipped work, either a large side project or an awesome feature at work

• Clear explanation of what you designed versus what you built

• Real interest in moving further into engineering over time

Why it's exciting

• You will own the frontend experience, not just a slice of it

• You will work on the highest-leverage parts of the product: onboarding, activation, paywall, and conversion

• You will have real influence over how PayMe feels and performs

• You will work on a small team where good ideas ship fast

What you own

• The frontend product experience end to end

• The quality bar for key user flows

• Designing and improving onboarding, activation, paywall, and other conversion-critical surfaces

• Turning fuzzy product questions into sharp design hypotheses and shipped improvements

• Using AI and lightweight implementation ability to help move frontend work forward

What success looks like

• Onboarding gets clearer and tighter

• Activation improves

• Paywall and conversion flows improve

• The app feels more coherent and polished

• Design stops being a bottleneck

What you're not here to do

• Be a pure visual designer who hands things off

• Be a backend or systems engineer

• Wait for perfect specs before moving

• Act as project manager for everyone else