Principal Design Engineer at Fiveonefour Labs Inc – San Francisco, California

A note about our job descriptions. We’ve written tons of JDs in our careers and wanted to try something new. We believe that everyone on the team deserves to have a great relationship with their manager from day 1. Our hiring managers write their job posts, choose their words intentionally, and use this as an opportunity to open up a dialogue.

We love data and analytics. And we love building software. But in our experience, to do anything truly interesting at scale with data/analytics, you have to leave the warm cozy world of software development, and enter the specialized workflows, tools, and technologies of the data engineering ecosystem. No more. We’re on a mission to democratize data and bring incredible software developer experiences to the data & analytics stack. In the future we’re building, ANY software developer (human or agentic) can build world class data-driven experiences – quickly and intuitively, as a native part of their core software development experience.

We’re experienced founders with a track record of success in developer tooling and enterprise software. We have a remote-first team of 15+, backed by incredible investors, and we’re building a high-performance culture that's demanding but flexible. We’re still small, but growing quickly, and joining at this time gives you a tremendous opportunity to help shape the culture and long term future of the company.

At the very core of our product and our company is one thing: developer experience. This role sits right at that core.

You are a designer at heart. You have exceptional taste, a sharp visual sensibility, and a deep conviction that the details are where great products are actually made. You sweat the interaction, the hierarchy, the spacing, the moment of delight that most people never consciously notice, but would immediately feel the absence of.

You also happen to know how to build what you design, and that makes you dangerous in the best possible way. You can accelerate our product team with both (1) your ability to actually ship code, and (2) your deep empathy for developers, and hard-earned opinions about what great DX actually feels like.

As our first Design Engineer, you’ll report to the Co-founder/CPO (that's me 👋). You'll be close to the founding team and central to every product decision.

You will shape the experiences through which our users interface with our product and our company. You'll bring a rigorous, user-driven design process: discovery, validation, iteration, and delivery. You'll produce work that's both visually refined and functionally thoughtful, whether that’s classic wireframes, journey maps, interaction flows, and high-fidelity visual designs, or jumping straight to iterating and prototyping in code, and shipping production-ready features and improvements. You understand design systems not as a constraint but as a force multiplier, and you'll help us build and scale ours.

Your primary focus will be product UX and GUI, but your scope will extend to programmatic interfaces (APIs, CLI), brand, marketing, and onboarding surfaces. You’ll work across both our open source agent harness MooseStack, and our commercial hosting platform.

This is a hands on, fast moving role. You’ll start as an individual contributor, with the opportunity to coach and mentor the designer we already have on the team. There’s also potential for you to lead the entire function as we grow, if that path interests you.

I am here for your long term professional success. This is the cornerstone of my approach to people management. I’m committed to helping you achieve your career goals – ideally within Fiveonefour – but even beyond, if that’s where your best path leads. This means I will invest in you, understanding your strengths and weaknesses, and coaching you through new skills and development. I will lead by example, as well as by sharing my experiences and lessons learned the hard way. I will be clear and direct when you are falling short and when I fall short myself. I will challenge you and give you opportunities to stretch your skills, but I will be there for you to support you when you need it - as long as you ask. And I’d love to have fun with you along the way ;)

Our team is composed of ambitious and pragmatic individuals who value each other's wellbeing. We embrace the energy of a startup environment, and our diverse backgrounds and experiences make every day’s interactions interesting. We’re all passionate about our work, and while we put in the long hours needed to be competitive as a high growth startup, we also emphasize flexibility - for example, many of us are parents and get creative to make startup-life work with parent-life.

• Own the end-to-end product design process: from discovery and user research, through wireframes and flows, and into working prototypes and production delivery; with quality and craft at every stage
• Set the aesthetic and interaction bar for the product and company; be the opinionated voice on what great looks and feels like
• Run high-velocity user discovery and validation directly with our developer users; building empathy, finding signal fast, and translating it into better products
• Build interactive prototypes and production-ready UI, iterating in code where it accelerates outcomes
• Evolve and scale our design system to support the product's growth and ensure consistency across surfaces
• Produce accessibility-compliant designs and advocate for inclusive design principles throughout the process
• Collaborate closely with product, engineering, and marketing, communicating design intent clearly across disciplines and shepherding decisions from idea to shipped product
• Influence product strategy and represent the developer user's best interests at every stage
• Leverage AI as a core accelerator: using it to amplify your differentiated human skills, not replace them

• 7+ years of experience in technical product design
• Portfolio that demonstrates beautiful, intuitive, and innovative work you've actually shipped
• Exceptional visual design sensibility: you can conceive, execute, and self-approve a design to a high standard
• Strong command of interaction design: you think in flows, states, edge cases, and transitions, not just screens
• Fluency in Figma, especially design systems and component libraries built for high-velocity iteration
• Solid frontend development skills: TypeScript, React, Tailwind, ShadCN; you prototype and implement in code
• Agentic coding experience: you know how to leverage your coding agent of choice to accelerate your development, and you’re not just vibe coding
• A track record of running user-facing discovery and validation
• Deep empathy for developers and hard-earned opinions about what great DX actually feels like
• Nice to have: experience designing or building developer tools

If you're looking for a challenging role and are excited to build a company from the ground up, please apply!