Staff Designer (Rapid Prototyping)

Mozilla; New York (NY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, vision coverage

Parental leave

401(k) retirement plan

Wellness stipend

Remote work support

Job summary

Mozilla is seeking a Staff Designer to shape the Thunderbolt product experience as it moves toward enterprise use. You’ll work at the intersection of product design, front-end engineering, prototyping, and AI-assisted development, contributing directly in the codebase.

You’ll turn ambiguous ideas into reusable interfaces, define interaction patterns for AI-powered features, and collaborate with product, design, and engineering teams to deliver production-ready experiences that are intuitive,

Qualifications

• 10+ years in design/engineering roles with leadership impact.
• Strong front-end engineering with JS/TypeScript and prototyping in codebase.
• Experience designing AI-enabled product experiences and interaction patterns.
• Experience building design systems or shared front-end architecture.

Responsibilities

• Prototype and production-ready UI in Thunderbolt codebase.
• Translate ambiguities into clear product experiences for enterprise needs.
• Define interaction patterns for AI-powered chat, search, and automation.
• Collaborate with product, design, and engineering teams to set direction.
• Improve usability, accessibility, security, and maintainability.

Skills

Design engineering

Front-end engineering

UX engineering

Product design

Leadership

Tools

JavaScript/TypeScript

Component-based frameworks

Job description

• Thunderbird is expanding beyond email with Thunderbolt, an open-source AI client designed for organizations that need more control over their data, infrastructure, and model choices
• We’re looking for a Staff Designer to help shape the product experience for Thunderbolt as it moves from early product development into enterprise use cases. This role sits at the intersection of product design, front-end engineering, prototyping, and AI-assisted product development
• You’ll turn early product ideas, user needs, partner feedback, and workflow concepts into working prototypes and production-ready user experiences. This is not a role focused only on mockups or design artifacts. You’ll work directly in the codebase, use AI-assisted development tools thoughtfully, and help define the interaction patterns that make Thunderbolt intuitive, useful, trustworthy, and enterprise-ready
• Build functional prototypes and product experiments directly in the Thunderbolt codebase
• Translate ambiguous product ideas, user workflows, partner feedback, and enterprise needs into clear, usable product experiences
• Help define interaction patterns for AI-powered chat, search, research, workflow automation, knowledge retrieval, and enterprise administration
• Use AI-assisted development tools to accelerate prototyping and implementation while maintaining strong judgment around quality, usability, security, accessibility, and maintainability
• Partner closely with product, design, engineering, and enterprise-facing teams to explore, validate, and refine product direction
• Contribute production-quality front-end code where appropriate
• Identify when a prototype should be discarded, refined, generalized, or productionized
• Improve the usability, accessibility, consistency, and polish of the Thunderbolt user experience
• Help develop reusable components, interface patterns, or design-system elements that create leverage for the broader product team
• Bring a user-centered perspective to technical and product discussions, especially where AI behavior, user trust, transparency, permissions, or workflow clarity are important
• Consider enterprise needs when designing product experiences, including data sensitivity, user control, administrative visibility, auditability, and security expectations
• Contribute to a product culture that values speed, clarity, experimentation, maintainability, responsible AI use, and thoughtful user experience

Benefits

• Health and wellness: Mozilla covers medical, dental and vision plan premiums at 100% for U.S. and Canadian employees. Our offerings give you the options you need to manage your health — and your family’s — the way you want.
• Mental health: Mental health is as important as our physical health. That’s why Mozilla’s health benefits include therapy and coaching sessions to make sure our people have access to the care they need.
• Time away: With all of life’s demands, time away from work to disconnect and recharge is essential. In addition to country-specific holidays (12 in the U.S. and Canada), vacation and sick time start accruing right away (specifics vary by country). Everyone also takes a pause together on quarterly all-company wellness days, plus you get to celebrate the most personal holiday of all: your birthday.
• Parental leave: While Mozilla’s parental leave policies vary globally, our U.S. and Canadian-based employees can look forward to 26 weeks of paid leave for childbearing parents and 12 weeks of paid leave for non-childbearing parents.
• Financial: Mozilla is a private company, so our compensation isn't tied to stock options or equity plans. Instead, we offer generous, performance-based bonus plans to all regular employees to underscore that we share in our success as one team. As for retirement savings for US and Canadian employees, Mozilla contributes a percentage of your eligible base salary each year to the 401(k) Plan/RRSP (regardless of whether you contribute or not), with 100% vesting.
• Learning and development: We’re big believers in learning by doing, and we also want to invest in your education and development beyond your role. Every employee is eligible for an annual professional development budget. Mozillians can put it toward technical or management training, certifications, conferences and more.
• Help when you need it: Life is full of surprises; that’s why it’s important to be prepared. Mozilla provides Life/AD&D and Short and Long Term Disability insurance (offerings may vary by locale) to ensure that you and your family will have a safety net in place should you ever need it.
• Plus a bit more: A few other benefits include a quarterly wellbeing stipend (to use on those things just for you), an employee referral bonus, internet reimbursement if you’re remote, and a budget for office essentials to make working remotely ergonomically comfortable.

You should be comfortable operating independently in ambiguity, moving quickly from concept to prototype, distinguishing between experiments and production-ready work, and creating reusable product and interaction patterns that help the broader team move fasterStrong product and interaction design judgment, including usability, accessibility, information architecture, workflow design, and product polishExperience providing technical or product leadership through mentoring, cross-functional coordination, reusable patterns, project ownership, or influence beyond individual deliverablesExperience designing, prototyping, or building AI-enabled product experiences, such as chat, search, research tools, agents, automation, knowledge interfaces, or workflow tools where user trust, context, output quality, and human oversight are central to the experienceExperience translating ambiguous product concepts into usable workflows, prototypes, and shipped product experiences, with the judgment to balance speed, quality, maintainability, learning, and product riskPractical awareness of AI, privacy, security, and regulatory considerations that may affect product experience, including transparency, user control, permissions, data handling, and trust; familiarity with frameworks such as the EU AI Act, Cyber Resilience Act, HIPAA, or comparable responsible AI, privacy, and security requirementsStrong front-end engineering skills, including experience with modern JavaScript or TypeScript, component-based frameworks, and building prototypes or production features directly in an application codebasePortfolio, case studies, shipped work, or examples demonstrating design-to-code execution, interactive prototypes, or product experience improvements10+ years of relevant experience in design engineering, front-end engineering, UX engineering, product design with strong technical implementation experience, or a closely related role, with demonstrated leadership and impact beyond individual deliverablesStrong communication and collaboration skills, including experience working closely with product managers, designers, engineers, and other cross-functional stakeholdersExperience working in open-source or highly collaborative engineering environmentsFamiliarity with user research, usability testing, product discovery, feature instrumentation, or rapid experimentation methodsExperience contributing to design systems, component libraries, reusable front-end architecture, or shared product interaction patternsExperience with enterprise software, developer tools, productivity tools, collaboration tools, self-hosted software, or other technical user workflows