Member of Technical Staff, Design Engineer

hussh ?; Kirkland (WA); On-site; USD 240,000 - 350,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision coverage

401(k) plan

Employer-matched contributions to 401k

AI courses and retraining

Job summary

Hussh, an AI-first research and product company in Kirkland, WA, seeks a design engineer who blends product design with production code to shape Private Agent One surfaces across platforms. You own design decisions from sketches to shipped pixels and drive performance budgets for a consistently smooth experience.

You will prototype agent paradigms in code using real models and data, ensuring accessibility and a delightful, trustworthy user experience at scale.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience across product design and front-end engineering, with shipped consumer products at significant scale.
• Last 5 years building AI products — conversational, agent, or assistant experiences — with depth in at least one area listed.
• A portfolio showing both interface design and production code you personally wrote to ship it.
• Native fluency on at least two client platforms (Apple platforms and web, or Android and web); working fluency across rest.
• Experience building and governing a design system used by engineers — tokens, components, and documentation.

Responsibilities

• Design and build Private Agent One surfaces in code across iOS, Android, web, and desktop.
• Own the design system as production software: tokens, components, and patterns across SwiftUI, Jetpack Compose, and React.
• Own motion and interaction: spring physics, transitions, and micro-interactions for a calm, legible experience.
• Prototype new agent paradigms in code with real models and data for informed decisions.
• Set and defend performance budgets for interface work, ensuring low latency and smooth frame rates.
• Iterate every surface until it feels inevitable.

Skills

Product design

Front-end engineering

AI products

Conversational interfaces

Tools

TypeScript

Swift

Kotlin

CSS

React

Next.js

SwiftUI

UIKit/AppKit

Jetpack Compose

Chrome extension platform

Figma

Storybook

Job description

Member of Technical Staff, Design Engineer — Product Surfaces, Interaction, Motion, Design Systems in Code

Type: Full-time

About Hussh

Hussh is an AI-first research, machine-learning, and product organization. We are building Private Agent One: a private personal AI agent — personal superintelligence that works for one human, and one human only. The human owns their information, controls it, and shares it only by explicit consent, through our PCHP (Personal Consent Handshake Protocol).

An agent a person trusts with their money, their messages, and their memory is an interface problem before it is anything else. Consent must be legible. Delegation must be visible. What the agent did, and why, must be understandable at a glance. That is design work, and at Hussh it is engineering work — built in code, at production quality, by the person who designed it.

The lab works from Kirkland, WA, with research partnerships at IIT Kharagpur and Stony Brook's AI3 institute. We are founder-funded. Our design doctrine is simple and enforced: few elements, each one rich; one idea per screen; motion explains, never decorates.

The role

You design and build the surfaces of Private Agent One across iOS, Android, web, Chrome, Windows, and Mac. You are the rare hybrid this industry keeps splitting in two: a designer with real taste and a production engineer who ships the design in code — the interaction model, the motion system, the component library, the rendering performance, all of it.

There is no handoff in this role, because there is no one to hand off to. You prototype in code from the first sketch, you make the design decisions, and you own the shipped pixel and the frame rate it animates at.

What you will do

• Design and build Private Agent One's core experiences in code: conversation, memory, consent and delegation flows, approvals, and the surfaces where a human sees what their agent knows and does.
• Own the design system as production software: tokens, components, and patterns shared across SwiftUI, Jetpack Compose, and React — one visual language, natively expressed on every platform.
• Own motion and interaction: the spring physics, transitions, and micro-interactions that make an agent feel alive, legible, and calm. Motion is how the agent explains itself; you are its author.
• Prototype new agent paradigms fast — in code, with real models and real data — so the team decides from experiences, not mockups.
• Set and defend performance budgets for interface work: cold start, scroll and animation frame rates, interaction latency — measured, not assumed.
• Run the plussing pass: nothing ships at "good enough." Every surface gets iterated until it feels inevitable.

Expectations

• Taste is a requirement, stated as plainly as any technical one: you can tell when something is technically correct and still bad — and you fix the bad.
• You hold the simplicity line against real pressure. When the room wants ten elements, you ship the two that matter, beautifully.
• You design for the human's trust, not for engagement extraction. No dark patterns, ever; consent surfaces are the most carefully designed surfaces in the product.
• You test with real humans: every flow gets a human walkthrough before it ships, alongside accessibility and automated checks.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience across product design and front-end engineering, with shipped consumer products at significant scale.
• The last 5 years building AI products — conversational, agent, or assistant experiences — with product depth in at least one of: personal information systems, subscriptions, ads, or relevance-driven feeds and ranking.
• A portfolio of shipped work that demonstrates both: interface design at a world-class bar, and production code you personally wrote to ship it. We will look at both, in depth.
• Native fluency on at least two client platforms (Apple platforms and web, or Android and web), and working fluency across the rest.
• Experience building and governing a design system used by other engineers — tokens, components, documentation, and the discipline to keep it coherent.
• Accessibility as practiced craft: WCAG, VoiceOver and TalkBack, dynamic type, contrast and motion-reduction support — shipped, not theoretical.

Technical requirements

• Languages: TypeScript and Swift at production level; Kotlin working fluency; CSS at the level where layout, animation, and rendering performance hold no surprises.
• Frameworks: React and modern web (Next.js or equivalent), SwiftUI and UIKit/AppKit interop, Jetpack Compose, Chrome extension platform.
• Motion and graphics: Core Animation, property-based and spring animation systems, Lottie/Rive, Canvas and WebGL/WebGPU where the experience demands it; shader or metal experience a plus.
• Design systems tooling: Figma (variables, components, Dev Mode), design-token pipelines (Style Dictionary or equivalent), component documentation (Storybook or equivalent).
• Prototyping: code-first prototyping; Framer, Principle, or Origami for quick interaction studies; direct work with live LLM APIs in prototypes.
• Engineering practice: Git-based workflow, CI/CD, performance profiling (Instruments, Chrome DevTools, Android Profiler), analytics instrumentation, and A/B experimentation on shipped surfaces.

Compensation

Base salary: $240,000–$350,000 USD per year, plus a founding equity grant (4-year vest). Where you land in the range depends on experience and the strength of the shipped work. Founding titles are permanent: no future re-leveling takes yours away.

Benefits

Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage. A 401(k) plan. Employer-matched contributions to Trump Accounts. Support for continuing education, retooling, and retraining — including AI courses, which we actively encourage. Above all: you will work with the latest AI technologies every day, and the expectation — for engineers and non-engineers alike — is to become expert in using them, running evals on your own work until it reaches an A+ standard.

Benefits are subject to the terms of the applicable plans and to eligibility requirements, in accordance with federal and state law.

Hussh is an equal opportunity employer. We hire on merit, competence, and qualifications, and do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected characteristic.