UI / UX Engineer (Design Technologist)

Mediabistro; California; Remote; USD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a leading AI company as a Design Engineer, where you'll design and build user interfaces for innovative speech and language services. Collaborate with product designers and engineers, and thrive in a remote-first environment that values creativity and transparency.

Benefits

Equity Grant

Deferred Salary Upside

Flexible Hours

Quarterly Hack-Weeks

Qualifications

• 3-6 years of experience in shipping production UI.
• Fluency in Figma and React 18 / Next.js.

Responsibilities

• Design user flows, wireframes, and high-fidelity comps.
• Implement designs as reusable React components.

Skills

Accessibility

Communication

React

TypeScript

Figma

Tailwind CSS

Tools

Next.js

Storybook

Jest

Job description

Whissle is an independent AI company performing orginal multi-modal speech-and-language research, building services and products.

Our cloud API powers :

• Real-time speech & language services (think “Deepgram, but open and programmable”)
• Conversational Bot – a chat assistant that controls IoT devices and answers everyday questions

Next up : native desktop (Electron / Tauri) and mobile (React Native / Expo) apps for those products. That’s where you come in.

What you’ll do

Design

• Turn ideas into user flows, wireframes, and high-fidelity Figma comps for web, desktop, and mobile.

Build

• Implement your designs as reusable React / React Native components in TypeScript & Tailwind + shadcn / ui.
• Create interactive prototypes in Storybook or Expo that talk to our speech API (WebSocket / WebRTC).

Own the design system

• Expand color, typography, icon, spacing, and motion tokens; keep Figma and code libraries in lock-step.
• Champion accessibility (WCAG 2.2), performance budgets, and responsive behavior across break-points.
• Pair daily with product designers, full-stack engineers, and researchers; present work in design reviews; help mentor interns.

You’ll thrive here if you have

• 3-6 years shipping production UI that matches your own high-fidelity designs.
• Fluency in Figma (auto-layout, variants, interactive components, Dev Mode).
• Production experience with React 18 / Next.js and TypeScript .
• Exposure to at least one of : React Native , Expo , Electron , or Tauri .
• Comfort using Tailwind CSS (or similar utility classes) and component libraries such as shadcn / ui .
• Familiarity with front-end testing (Jest, React Testing Library) and component docs ( Storybook / Chromatic ).
• Solid grasp of accessibility principles and inclusive design.
• Ability to communicate design rationale clearly in a fast-moving, async-friendly environment.
• Working with real-time streams (WebSockets, WebRTC).
• IoT dashboards or conversational-UI experience.
• Contributions to open-source design systems or tooling.
• Ownership that matters – receive a meaningful early-stage equity grant , vesting over four years with a one-year cliff, so you grow alongside Whissle.
• Deferred-salary upside – we accrue your cash salary from day one and pay it out in a lump sum at our next funding or revenue milestone. It gives us runway now and rewarding you later.
• Remote-first life – flexible hours, minimal meetings, async-by-default.
• Quarterly hack-weeks – Build passion projects, explore new tech, collaborate and showcase to the whole team.

Why you’ll love working with us

• Modern stack – React 18, Next.js 14 App Router, Expo, Tauri, Vercel, GitHub Actions.
• Creative domain – build tools for creators, developers, and everyday smart-home users.
• Transparent culture – open roadmaps, clear milestones, direct access to founders.

Ready to join?

• Tell us about a product where you designed and built the UI yourself.

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