Founding Design Engineer

Credal; United States; On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Meals provided

Free team lunch & dinner

Situational hybrid work flexibility

High quality health coverage

Parental leave up to 12 weeks

Unlimited PTO with year-end break

Job summary

Credal is seeking the first design hire to define and own the design function. You will translate company strategy and user needs into visual language, own the design system, and author front-end code within reason.

This is an in-person role based at Credal’s NYC office, with meals provided and a strong impact on product storytelling. You’ll join a small, ambitious team building enterprise software with a frontier AI approach, shaping how complex systems feel and are used by thousands of

Qualifications

• Translate company strategy and user needs into visual language.
• Own and evolve the design system.
• Author front-end code within reason.

Responsibilities

• Translate company strategy and user needs into visual language.
• Own and evolve the design system.
• Author front-end code within reason.

Skills

Design leadership

UI design

Design systems

Frontend code

Job description

About us

Our mission at Credal is to harness frontier AI for everyone building a better future.

We accelerate the most complex, sophisticated operations of the most impactful institutions, while weaving security and governance into every part of our product. Our customers include the U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services, MongoDB, Comcast NBC Universal, Lattice, Wise (Transferwise), Checkr, and incident.io among others.

We’ve raised over $10m to date with a ton of runway. You’ll join a team of Thoughtful Doers™ from places like Palantir, Cruise, Meta, Uber, and Google.

Credal is in-person in our spacious NYC office with meals provided.

This role

We're looking for the person who will define what design means at Credal. You’ll be the first design hire and you'll own the function.

Credal sits on top of some of the most complex and important machinery in enterprise software: permission inheritance across a thousand data sources, agent registries, governance policy, audit lineage. And we're building it on the frontier of AI, where the conventions for how any of this should look and feel haven't been established yet; so there's real room to explore and define them across the industry. Our customers include some of the most important institutions in the world, and we're actively relied on every day by thousands of employees at customers like HHS, Flatiron Health, Comcast, and Wise.

Today, our engineering is ahead of our storytelling. The gap between what we've built and how clearly a user grasps it in the first thirty seconds is the single highest-leverage problem we can hand to one person. That's this role.

What you'll own

• Translate company strategy and user needs into visual language. Concretely, that means product UI and user stories. You turn a go-to-market bet into something people immediately understand.

• Own and evolve the design system. The rules, components, patterns, and principles that allow our engineering team to iterate quickly without sacrificing legibility.

• Author front-end code within reason. Enough to build and maintain the design system in code, prototype your own ideas, and ship polish without waiting in an eng queue. You won't carry a backend load (unless you're interested); we have a full team for that.

The honest split

This role is roughly 70% design, 30% code. We have a full team for feature development, but you'll need to be self-sufficient prototyping and able to iterate on frontend-specific production changes yourself. If you're a brilliant designer who codes enough to be dangerous, you're exactly who we want; if you're an engineer who dabbles in design, this probably isn't your seat.

You'll thrive here if

• You think in systems. You understand user needs deeply enough to turn them into reusable patterns. The kind that act as a force multiplier on the whole team rather than a one-off fix.

• You can sit with our users and the team, synthesize strategy, and come back with a visual story that makes it land.

• You have strong, defensible opinions about type, layout, motion, and information density.

• Enterprise, technical, developer-facing product excites rather than bores you. Making the complicated feel simple is the whole job.

• You want the range and ownership that only exist at a small company.

Benefits and work environment

• We reject toxicity and we embrace care for each other. A magical company culture and your wellbeing is leadership's top priority. Every decision we make as a company is evaluated through that lens.

• Opportunities to network, grow, and advance quickly. We're a small, but rapidly expanding, team - and we always aim to promote from within first.

• Free team lunch & dinner.

• Situational hybrid work flexibility.

• High quality health coverage, including great mental health benefits, for you and your immediate family. This includes comprehensive and HSA options.

• Industry-leading vision, dental, life, disability coverage.

• We encourage you to take up to 12 weeks of parental leave after the birth or adoption of a child.

• Regular team activities & offsite events (last year we went to Turks and Caicos for a hackathon week!)

• Unlimited PTO - and unlike some other companies, we're serious about you taking the time you need to recharge and be the best you can be! We also offer a guaranteed two weeks off during the last two weeks of December when the entire company goes on vacation!

• A generous housing subsidy for those who choose to live in Brooklyn.

• Our spacious office in Dumbo has a stocked kitchen and views of the bridge.

Interview process

• Intro conversation with our leadership team (CEO, COO, CTO depending on the role).

• Virtual screen.

• Onsite to meet our team and CEO.

• References (we check references on everyone at Credal to make sure all your future coworkers are world class and great to be around).

More about us

We’ve built the industry’s highest ceiling and most secure Action & Agent building platform for sticky, custom AI workflows. Use cases span countless domains, including: KYC, anti-money laundering, healthcare regulation, climate standards setting, cybersecurity, sales, people, IT, and customer support.

• Cultural principles
• Team of 13 with 9 engineers.
• 7-figure ARR.
• >100% NRR.
• Product docs, case studies, blog, podcast