Product Designer

Ground Control; San Francisco (CA); Sur place; USD 100 000 - 140 000; Plein temps

Résumé du poste

Ground Control is hiring a frontend-focused designer who will own how the product looks and behaves, and who will also write the front-end code. You will ship features directly, not hand off, in a small, ambitious team building a factory floorplan platform with live database capabilities.

We use React/TypeScript, Supabase, and Postgres, with an emphasis on practical code and a strong design system. You’ll work closely with engineering to iterate quickly and deliver meaningful improvements for

Qualifications

• Shipped product design you're proud of for real users.
• Strong frontend coding mindset; value shipping working code over mockups.
• Comfort with React/TypeScript and collaborating without a design manager.

Responsabilités

• Own how Ground Control looks, feels, and behaves in the frontend.
• Build interactive canvases, flows, and views as shipped features.
• Extend and enforce the design system with practical code.
• Collaborate directly with engineering to ship features, not hand off.
• Interface with customers and adapt to rapid, real-world needs.

Connaissances

React

TypeScript

UI/UX

Outils

Supabase

Postgres

Cursor

Claude Code

Description du poste

We're hiring the person who will own how Ground Control looks, feels, and behaves — and who will write the front-end code that makes it real. This is an environment where Product Designers get to ship their ideas.

We are building the Figma of factory floorplans. Ground Control is facilities management software for hard tech manufacturing: aerospace, energy, nuclear. The companies building the physical future run their buildings on spreadsheets, PDFs of floor plans, and text messages to the maintenance guy. We think that's absurd. Your floor plan shouldn't be just a drawing — it should be a database.

We recently revamped our branding and website. You can also see a video demo of the product. Although we've built a lot in the a few months since we made the video! https://www.groundcontroldev.com/

We're a four-person team, venture-backed, with signed defense and aerospace manufacturers as customers and more in the pipeline than we can currently build for. That last part is why this role exists.

We're looking for someone who's going to live and breathe the product, constantly finding problems to fix and new features to build.

What you'll actually work on

• The blueprint canvas. An interactive floor plan that is also a live database — pan, zoom, annotate, measure, crop, place assets, export. This is the hardest and most interesting surface in the product, and it has no obvious prior art to copy. Think Figma's canvas problems, applied to a nuclear facility.
• Request and incident flows. How a technician on a factory floor files a request in under thirty seconds, often from a phone, often from a QR code stuck to a wall. How an ops manager triages a hundred of them without drowning.
• Portfolio and building views. A facilities director with twelve buildings needs to know what's broken, what's scheduled, and what's about to cost them money — at a glance.
• The design system. It exists and it's opinionated. You'll extend it, enforce it, and argue with us about it.
• Asset Management.
• Vendor flows and marketplace.
• Whatever the enterprise customer needs next. We build custom software for large manufacturers, and scope changes fast.

You will design these and then build them. Not hand them off — build them. Shipped code is the unit of work here!

Who we're looking for

We care about evidence, not years.

• You've shipped product design that you're proud of, to real users. Not concepts, not Dribbble shots. Screens people use to do their job.
• You want to build what you design. React and TypeScript is our world, but you don't need to have shipped in it. You need to want to — to be the kind of person who'd rather hand us a working thing than a picture of one. We'll teach you the rest by reviewing your work, not in a classroom.
• You've worked without a design manager and the quality didn't drop. Nobody here will review your work before it ships. That's either the best or worst sentence in this posting, depending on who you are.
• You have taste and you can defend it. We'll disagree with you. We want you to push back with a reason, change your mind when the reason is better, and not relitigate it in three weeks.
• You like hard, unglamorous domains. Facilities management is not a sexy category. Factories, work orders, HVAC schedules, and compliance paperwork. If that sounds boring rather than delicious, this isn't the one.
• You move fast and finish things. We'd rather see four shipped features than one perfect exploration.
• You've already started with AI tools on your own. Not as a novelty — out of curiosity, before anyone asked you to. Cursor and Claude Code are in our toolchain. If you've built something clumsy with them for yourself on a weekend, that counts for more here than production experience does.

Helpful but not required: canvas or spatial UI experience, whether that came from Figma, CAD, mapping, or games; an industrial, construction, or hardware-adjacent background; Supabase, Postgres, or similar.

When this is the wrong job

We'd rather lose you now than in month three:

• You want to specialize. This role is deliberately wide and will stay wide for at least a year.
• You want a research function, a PM to write the spec, or a QA pass before release. You are those things here.
• You want to manage people. There's nobody to manage, and won't be for a while.
• You need a stable roadmap. Ours changes when a customer signs.
• You're mainly excited about brand, marketing sites, or illustration. We value that work and we contract for it — but this role is product, every day.

How we work

Stack: React, TypeScript, Supabase, Postgres, deployed on Railway. Heavy use of AI-assisted development — Cursor and Claude Code are part of the toolchain, not a guilty secret.

Design process: we prototype in HTML, not Figma (unless you really want to). Ideally mockups are real code from the first pass, which means the gap between designed and shipped is small, and the thing you design is the thing that exists. If you've never worked this way, you'll like it more than you expect.

Cadence: small team, no ceremony. We talk constantly, write things down in the places that matter, and ship continuously. Nobody tracks your hours. Everybody knows what everybody shipped last week.

Customers: you will talk to them. Facilities directors, maintenance leads, construction managers. Some of them will show you their actual factory. This is one of the better parts of the job.

Details

Reports to: the Design Engineer you'll be working with daily.

Start: as soon as you can.

Engagement: contract to start, converting to full-time. Roughly three months, full-time hours, real work shipping into the product. It isn't a hedge about whether we want a designer — it's that we both learn more from a month of actual work together than from any interview.

Process: intro call with the founder, then a portfolio and craft conversation with the design engineer, then a short project scoped to about 1-2 hours of work. Then the offer.

The conversion trigger, so it isn't vague: we convert when you're shipping into the codebase independently — designing and merging work without us gating it. We expect that inside three months, and we'll tell you at the start where the bar is and where you stand against it.

Looking forward to hearing from you and thanks for taking the time to read this post!