Senior Design Engineer

Petra Security; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Equity

Healthcare

Lunch and dinner when in office

401K

Commuting stipend

Equinox discount

Relocation support

Job summary

Petra Security is seeking a design engineer to own frontend UX decisions for our AI-driven Security platform. You will transform loose ideas into production-ready UX using React and TypeScript, collaborating with founders to shape product direction and scale Petra’s interfaces for MSPs and security teams.

You will prototype when needed, emphasize performance and accessibility, and build reusable systems as we grow 10x. This in-person SF role blends design and engineering into one craft.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of design engineering experience.
• You build for real problems and ship features.
• Strong frontend coding skills with React.

Responsibilities

• Turn rough ideas into shipped product.
• Raise the bar for product quality end-to-end.
• Prototype in code when needed to validate ideas.
• Show up as part of the customer's team and learn workflows.
• Build foundational systems and design tokens for scale.

Skills

Frontend development

React

TypeScript

UX design

AI tools

Performance

Shipping mindset

Tools

Figma

Job description

Who We Are

We’re on a mission to stop the most dominant cyberattacks on the planet.

Cybersecurity titans are born when a new attack vector overwhelms existing defenses. When ransomware ran rampant, CrowdStrike emerged as the category leader for securing user endpoints. Today, AI has made account compromise the #1 cybercrime. LLM-powered phishing messages get past email security, allowing attackers to compromise accounts and exfiltrate sensitive data in minutes. Incumbents can't keep up. They catch these attacks late, or miss them altogether.

Enter Petra, security for when no perimeter remains. We are building an AI-driven Detection and Response platform to catch and remove attackers before they can act.

We've grown very quickly, reaching mid-7-figures in ARR in under a year — we now protect over 2.5 million users across 10,000+ businesses. We price premium, yet have extremely low customer churn. Our customers consistently tell us that Petra is the best product they've ever used. You can see a demo here.

This is a rare chance to join early and help scale to $30M+ in revenue in the next 12 months.

Why This Role, Why Now

Ownership is everything here. Petra is a premium product and it's everyone's job to make sure it stays that way.

We have a growing customer base and a deep backlog of things they're asking us to build. We're expanding Petra into new user flows and product surfaces every week. When you ship something good, customers feel it fast, and every win builds Petra's reputation and earns the trust to do more for them.

You'll be the domain expert for how it feels to use Petra. You'll collaborate with our founders to decide what great looks like, then build it.

What You'll Do

• Turn rough ideas into shipped product. Start from a loose Figma exploration, a customer problem, or a half-formed intuition, and take it all the way to production-ready UX.

• Raise the bar for product quality, end to end. Visual design, interaction design, accessibility, responsiveness, performance, and the micro-details most people never get to. You care about how the whole thing fits together.

• Prototype in code. When Figma is too slow or too static for motion, interaction, keyboard behavior, AI workflows, or information-dense views, you build the real thing to find the answer.

• Show up as part of the customer's team. Talk to MSPs and security teams, map their workflows, find their time-sinks, and turn what you learn into UX they can feel.

• Build foundational systems. Reusable primitives, design tokens, and component APIs: the difference between a one-off fix and a system that holds up as we grow 10x.

Our stack is React, TypeScript, Node, and Python... for now.

Who You Are

• 4+ years of design engineering experience, with meaningful time building production UX pre-LLMs.

• You build for real problems. Everything you ship traces back to a real user need, not tech for its own sake.

• Taste. You notice when something is off, and you know how to fix it.

• Real empathy for users. You think about how people actually use software and you excel at putting yourself in our users’ shoes.

• Comfort with ambiguity. Give you a vague product area and you'll form an opinion, try a few things, get feedback, and ship.

• You like both design and engineering. To you it's all one craft.

• Frontend range. You write clean, fast production React, and you go deeper than the UI layer when a problem calls for it. Performance-sensitive UI work is a plus.

• You use AI tools well. They help you move faster and try more, without doing your thinking for you.

• A bias to ship. You move fast without dropping the bar.

• Complexity is earned. You reach for the simplest thing that works, and you only add complexity when the problem truly demands it.

• Your own worst critic. You catch the flaws in your work before anyone else does.

• A body of work. You’ve shipped products, side projects, open source, anything with a clear point of view. We care more about what you've built than how long you've been building.

The Team

We're small and high-caliber. Our founders are ex-Abnormal Security, Palo Alto Networks, and Bridgewater. Other early team members include:

• A Sequoia-backed founder

• An engineering leader from Anduril

• Quants from Citadel and Point72

You'll work directly with people who are exceptional at what they do.

Benefits and Pay

• Competitive salary. We pay top dollar for exceptional engineers.

• Equity

• Healthcare, dental, vision

• Lunch and dinner when working in the office

• 401K

• Commuting stipend

• Equinox discount

• Relocation support

This role is in-person, here in SF.

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Petra is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team and welcome applicants of all backgrounds.