Head of Design Engineering View role →

Tasklet; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

In-office role in San Francisco

Job summary

Tasklet is building an AI platform that lets teams run their business with agents. We seek a Head of Design Engineering (IC) to own the experience holistically, making the product simple, intuitive, and beautiful, while personally implementing much of it in production.

You will work directly with founders, customers, and engineers to shape design, ship features, and set the bar for the company with judgment, feedback, and example. This is a full-time, in-person role in San Francisco.

Qualifications

• Hands-on engineer with exceptional design judgment.
• Experience taking an idea from concept to production software.
• Founder or meaningful product ownership preferred.
• Ability to ship with AI-assisted workflows.

Responsibilities

• Own Tasklet's product design end-to-end, making the whole product simple, intuitive, coherent, and beautiful.
• Write production code and ship most of your work with no traditional handoff.
• Invent interaction models for AI work and make agents trustworthy across latency and errors.
• Simplify complex systems by removing unnecessary concepts and UI.
• Obsess over details: interaction, copy, motion, accessibility, and reliability.
• Prototype and iterate rapidly using AI as a creativity partner.
• Raise the design bar by sharing durable product principles and patterns.

Skills

Frontend development

Design judgment

Product thinking

AI tooling / AI-assisted design

Production software engineering

Tools

React

TypeScript

Job description

Tasklet is building the AI platform companies use to run their business on agents. A customer describes an outcome in plain English, and Tasklet gets the work done across their tools and systems—immediately or in the cloud 24×7. We are building for real-world businesses, where making powerful agents simple, trustworthy, and easy to control matters just as much as making them intelligent.

This creates a defining product-design challenge: inventing how people and teams work with AI that does real work, not merely chats. We're looking for a Head of Design Engineering to own that experience holistically—making the entire product simple, intuitive, and beautiful, then personally implementing most of it in production.

This is an IC role, not a design-management role. You will work directly with our founders, customers, and engineers to decide how Tasklet should work, design it, and ship it. You will set the design bar for the company through your judgment, feedback, and example—not through process or a large team.

We need someone who has built something real and meaningful from scratch, ideally as a founder. You should be an exceptional product thinker, designer, and frontend engineer. This is one of the highest-leverage roles at Tasklet, and we're willing to pay accordingly.

Responsibilities

• Own Tasklet's product design end to end. Make the whole product feel simple, intuitive, coherent, and beautiful—not just individual screens or features.
• Build what you design. You will personally write production code and ship most of your work. There is no traditional design-to-engineering handoff.
• Invent the interaction model for AI work. Make powerful agents understandable and trustworthy across latency, uncertainty, permissions, errors, human handoffs, and recovery. There is no playbook; you'll write it.
• Simplify relentlessly. Understand complex systems deeply enough to remove concepts, steps, and UI. Push back when the product is becoming harder to understand.
• Obsess over the details. Interaction, hierarchy, copy, motion, responsiveness, performance, accessibility, and reliability are all part of the design. Take Tasklet from good to a product people rave about.
• Prototype and iterate at AI speed. Use AI heavily across product exploration, design, implementation, and testing. Nearly every line of code at Tasklet is written with AI, and we expect you to use it as a serious creative and engineering collaborator.
• Raise the design bar across the company. Give direct, high-quality feedback; establish durable product principles and reusable patterns; and inspire everyone—not only designers—to make better product decisions.

Our ideal candidate

• You're a hands-on engineer with exceptional design judgment. You are fluent in modern frontend development and can take an idea all the way to polished production software yourself.
• You've created something real from zero. Ideally, you've been a founder or had equivalent ownership of a meaningful product from its earliest conception through real customer use. Your portfolio shows personal authorship, not just participation.
• You think in products and systems, not screens. You can form a clear mental model of a complicated system and turn it into something ordinary people immediately understand.
• You have exceptional taste and sweat the details. You care about the final 10% that separates functional software from software people love.
• You lead while remaining an IC. You make teammates better through shipped work, crisp principles, thoughtful critique, and high standards. You want influence, not a management empire.
• You're deeply AI-pilled. You use AI every day to explore more ideas, build faster, and produce better work. You're excited to define new interaction patterns for humans and agents.
• You thrive in a fast-moving, process-light startup. You're comfortable with ambiguity, changing priorities, direct feedback, and imperfect information. You create clarity without creating bureaucracy.
• You have strong opinions, loosely held. You advocate for the user and the quality bar, but change your mind quickly when the evidence is better.
• You could easily get a senior engineering or design-engineering role at a top AI lab—but you want the autonomy and outsized impact of helping Tasklet win.

This role is full-time and in-person at our office at 1 Post St. in San Francisco.