Product Design Engineer

C1; Portland (OR); On-site; USD 110,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

C1.ai is building a horizontal identity platform. We are seeking a Design Engineer who thrives at the intersection of design thinking and hands-on building. This role blends design with coding, often in the same session, using agentic development as a core approach.

You’ll move between modern design tools and AI coding harnesses, contributing to a small, high-output team with strong ownership and autonomy. You’ll design and ship end-to-end product experiences, collaborate with engineers and

Qualifications

• Strong product design instincts and ability to ship in fast cycles.
• Figma proficiency and design system experience.
• Experience with AI tooling and agentic development.

Responsibilities

• Design and build product experiences end to end, from problem framing through working implementation.
• Work daily with AI-native toolkit and prototyping tools.
• Make design decisions grounded in data from usage, research, and feedback.
• Contribute to and evolve our design system for consistency and quality.
• Work directly in code to prototype, validate, and ship UI.
• Communicate the why behind design decisions clearly and publicly.
• Collaborate with engineering and product to maintain quality at speed.

Skills

Product design

Systems thinking

Communication

Figma experience

AI tooling

Prompting

Team collaboration

Code literacy

Tools

React

TypeScript

CSS frameworks

Pen.dev

Paper

Claude Design

Claude Code

Codex

Cursor

Job description

C1.ai is building a horizontal identity platform. Identity is becoming the control plane for modern companies. Every organization runs on dozens—sometimes hundreds—of systems that need to answer the same basic question: who can do what, when, and why?

The old approach doesn’t hold up. It’s either IT teams duct-taping systems together, or rigid IGA tools that only work across a narrow set of HR and SSO integrations. That’s not going to cut it for the next decade.

We’re building something more foundational: a horizontal identity platform that any company—and increasingly, any AI agent—can plug into to understand and manage access. SaaS apps, infrastructure, internal tools, AI agents—if it has a concept of “who,” it should connect to us.

We’re still small, and we move fast. If you want to help build this from the ground up, you’ll have real ownership here.

The Role

We're looking for a Design Engineer: someone who lives at the intersection of design thinking and hands-on building. This isn't a traditional design role where you hand off specs to engineering. You'll be designing and shipping, often in the same session, with agentic development as a core part of how you work. The right person has strong product design instincts but leads with building. You move fluidly between modern design tools and AI coding harnesses (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or whatever you've tuned for yourself), with the balance tipped toward code. You have a sharp sense for why something should exist and how it should work, and you can move from that clarity to a working implementation quickly. You'll be joining a small, high-output design team where everyone operates with a lot of ownership and autonomy.

What You'll Do

• Design and build product experiences end to end, from problem framing through working implementation.
• Work across a modern, AI-native toolkit every day: agentic coding harnesses, design tools like Paper and Pen.dev, prototyping tools like Claude Design, and MCP integrations that connect them. Use whatever gets you from idea to artifact fastest.
• Make design decisions grounded in data. Draw on research and specs from product designers and product managers, and use tools to pull signal from usage, support, and customer feedback yourself, then translate what you find into solutions.
• Contribute to and evolve our design system, ensuring consistency and quality as the product surface area grows.
• Work directly in code to prototype, validate, and ship UI. Not as a novelty, but as your default mode.
• Communicate the why behind design decisions clearly and publicly. We design in the open here.
• Collaborate closely with engineering and product to maintain quality at speed.

You'd Be a Great Fit If…

• You build things for fun. Side projects, tools, prototypes, experiments: you have a track record of making stuff outside of your day job.
• You're all-in on AI tooling and actively use it to accelerate your work. You have opinions about which tools work and which don't, and you're always trying new ones.
• You understand that building well with AI is about orchestration, not volume: planning what to build, managing context deliberately, and writing clear prompts. You know the difference between shouting at a model and actually steering it.
• You have real product design skill (layout, hierarchy, interaction patterns, systems thinking), even if your recent work leans more toward code.
• You have solid Figma experience. It's no longer our primary tool, but it's still part of the ecosystem and you should be fluent in it.
• You're comfortable navigating ambiguity. You can take a vague problem, frame it clearly, and start building toward an answer.
• You understand technical constraints well enough to know when to push for design quality and when to ship the pragmatic solution.
• You have experience building or contributing to design systems.
• You're a clear communicator (written, verbal, and visual) and you default to sharing work early and often.
• You're curious about the frontier of design and AI: how the craft is changing, what new workflows look like, and where the discipline is headed.

Extra Credit

• Experience with identity, security, or infrastructure products.
• Familiarity with React, TypeScript, and modern CSS frameworks.
• Experience with code-native design tools like Paper or Pen.dev, or building your own agent workflows and skills.

Hiring philosophy

We care about both excellence and grit. You don’t need to check every single box to apply—if this feels like the kind of place you want to build, we’d like to hear from you.

c1.ai is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.