Founding Design Engineer

weaveos.com; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance (vision/dental)

Free lunch/dinners/snacks

Yearly learning stipend

Yearly team offsite

Job summary

Weave — a YC-backed startup — seeks a Founding Design Engineer to translate complex engineering data into simple, beautiful interfaces. You’ll own the design-technical interface, shaping systems and frontend standards as the team moves from early to rapid growth.

You’ll collaborate closely with Andrew (CTO) and Adam (CEO) to mentor, own ownership from day one, and ship delightful experiences that empower millions of engineers and leaders to understand engineering work more clearly.

Qualifications

• You are proficient in Figma and front-end workflows.
• You can build and evolve design systems that scale.
• You communicate clearly with engineers, product, and leadership.
• You show empathy for users and engineers alike in decisions.
• You are resilient and able to navigate startup ambiguity.

Responsibilities

• Own the intersection of design and engineering to turn data into delightful interfaces.
• Build and maintain design systems and frontend standards.
• Partner with leadership to align product vision with technical constraints.
• Move quickly to ship thoughtful, scalable features that engineers love.

Skills

Figma

Frontend coding

Design systems

strong communication

empathy

grit

Tools

React

CSS

Job description

Weave (YC W25) is building the definitive platform for understanding and improving how engineering teams work. We believe the way engineering output is measured today is fundamentally broken and that modern AI can give teams a far more accurate and actionable view of productivity, impact and collaboration.

Trusted by 200+ customers such as Robinhood, Rho, PostHog and Browserbase, we’ve delivered consistent double-digit month-over-month revenue growth since May and are looking to accelerate our growth.

As Weave's Founding Design Engineer, your job is to make complex engineering data feel simple, beautiful and actionable. You'll own the intersection of design and engineering, turning insights about how software teams work into interfaces that leaders and engineers actually love using. You'll be building our design systems and frontend standards as you go to make every incremental feature easier to build and more delightful to use. Your goal will be to delight customers with experiences that make their job 10x easier.

We've raised a $13.5 million Series A and are backed by Standard Capital, YCombinator, Moonfire, Burst Capital, IrregEx and the Agent Fund.

This is a rare opportunity to join at the ground floor and shape how millions of engineers and leaders understand engineering work.

What We’re Building

Weave is rethinking engineering output from first principles.

We use AI to:

• Understand how engineers actually work (not just what they ship)

• Surface meaningful insights about productivity, quality, collaboration and impact

• Help teams improve outcomes without vanity metrics or surveillance

Our goal is not to optimize for “more output,” but for better engineering.

The Team You’ll Work With

You’ll work directly with:

• Andrew (CTO) – previously a founding engineer at Causal, MIT alum. Andrew has been in your shoes and is deeply committed to providing the mentorship, ownership and growth he had as an early engineer.

• Adam (CEO) – leads sales and customer discovery. Adam is a former sales executive at multiple high-growth startups and deeply embedded with customers and scaled multiple sales teams from $0-30M in ARR.

This is a small, intense, highly collaborative team. You will have real ownership from day one.

Must haves

You are a good fit for Weave if you are a formidable design engineer. This means you stop at nothing to accomplish your goal. We don't care much about your current skills or even what you've done before; we care that you will be able to do anything you set your mind to.

You must be pragmatic. Weave is a startup so something is always on fire. You need to know when to let little fires burn and when to break out the extinguisher.

You must have strong design taste and the engineering skills to bring your ideas to life. You should be equally comfortable in Figma and in code. You're obsessed with craft, the micro-interaction that feels off, the visualization that could tell a clearer story, the flow that adds one too many clicks.

You must be empathetic. We're building products for other people, so you need to understand how they think and why. You'll be the voice of the user in every product decision.

You must care about helping software engineering teams be great. If that's not exciting to you, it will be hard to stay motivated through the inevitable highs and lows.

You must be an excellent communicator. You're building a product that communicates complex data to millions of engineers and leaders, clarity and intuition need to come naturally to you.

Finally you must be gritty. You should be accustomed to picking the hard option and pushing through it.

This role is 5 days in office in SF

Nice to haves

(Please feel free to apply even if some or all of these don't apply to you!)

Experience designing and building data-dense interfaces, dashboards, analytics tools, developer tools, is a big plus.

If you've already done lots of thinking about engineering productivity and how to improve it, that's great and we want to hear about it!

A portfolio or collection of work that shows both your design sensibility and your ability to implement is ideal, but not required.

Why Join

• Competitive pay + early equity

• Health/vision/dental insurance covered

• Free lunch/dinners/snacks

• Yearly team offsite with regular team events

• Yearly $500 learning/development stipend

• Get to work in SF with one of the fastest moving teams (95%+ percentile code output)

About the interview

1. 15-minute intro call

2. Take home assessment

3. One-hour interview/portfolio review with our CEO, Adam

4. 45 min technical interview with our CTO, Andrew

5. One-hour technical interview with our CTO, Andrew

6. 3-5 day paid work trial