Design Engineer, SimplyCodes

You can draw the screen and ship it the same day. You own the design and the code of the SimplyCodes screens, the interface that earns the large majority of the company's revenue, beside the designer who owns the bar.

Product.ai is the verified truth layer for shopping: when a person or an AI agent needs to know what's actually true about a purchase, we answer with proof. SimplyCodes is the first proof at scale, the code verification service, at about $22M a year in revenue. Profitable. Founder-owned since 2009, bootstrapped, no outside investors, no board. Fewer than twenty operators.

Why This Role Exists

Design here is held to a founder-level bar by one Founding Designer, whose focus is now the design strategy of our chat agent. That leaves the SimplyCodes screens, the code-verification pages real shoppers use every day, without a dedicated owner who can draw a screen and ship it the same day. This seat is that owner, starting on SimplyCodes specifically. It is one of the most urgent seats in the company right now: a surface that earns the large majority of our revenue, that people find and trust through search before they ever use it, and that has no full-time design owner today.

You're earlier in your career than most people we hire, maybe two to five years in, and that's on purpose. What we need isn't seniority. It's someone who already thinks in both design and code, has a real human-computer interaction background, is fluent with the AI tools that now do the mechanical part of both, and wants to run a consumer surface end to end while learning the taste side beside someone who has it. You work beside our Founding Designer, and you have a direct line to the founder.

The part that makes this different from a frontend job with a nicer title: our design system is law, not a guideline. Its tokens and components are read directly by the agents that generate our interfaces, so an ambiguity in the system becomes a defect in the product. Owning that layer for SimplyCodes, the machine-readable design layer, is the AI half of the job.

The System You'll Need to Model

• SimplyCodes as the cash engine. The code-verification and merchant pages earn the large majority of the company's revenue, so a design defect there is a revenue defect, not a polish issue.
• Pages built for two readers at once. A shopper who has to trust that a code works, and the search engine that finds and ranks the page before any person sees it.
• A design system agents build inside. Tokens, a component catalog and usage rules precise enough that an AI generating a SimplyCodes screen stays within them without a person checking every line. Ambiguity in the system becomes a defect in the product, so precision is the craft, not decoration.
• Prototypes that are the real thing. The design-to-engineering handoff is gone here. A direction is explored as a working prototype in a design tool and in code in the same session, and the survivors ship. You'll live in the loop where a design tool, a coding agent and a browser are open at the same time.
• Decision-shaped interfaces. The unit of a SimplyCodes screen is a verified code and how sure we are that it works. Confidence has to read honestly, never oversold and never buried, and that's motion, state and typography doing trust work.
• Cortex, the shared AI brain the company runs on. You'll work inside it daily, directing coding agents the way our founder does, and since August any operator here can change the rules the company runs on, live, without waiting on him.

If reading that energizes you, keep going. If it feels overwhelming or underspecified, this isn't the right fit.

What You Will Own

• The SimplyCodes screens. The code-verification and merchant pages, design and code, end to end. The product manager who owns the SimplyCodes website decides what a page does; you decide how it looks, behaves and is built.
• The design system in code, for SimplyCodes. The tokens, components and rules the agents generate inside, kept precise, documented and current. When a generated screen breaks the system, you find out why the system let it, and you fix the system. The engineer who owns the frontend codebase's infrastructure and performance keeps that fortress; you own the design-system layer and the interface craft inside it.
• Working prototypes and shipped components. Directions taken from a sketch to a running prototype and, when they clear the bar, to production. You build in design tools and in code, and you don't wait for a handoff in either direction.
• The polish layer. Motion, state, spacing, type: the thousand small decisions that make a trust interface feel trustworthy. You notice a misaligned pixel and you can say what it costs.
• Your seat charter. Within your first quarter you co-sign a charter for this seat. It names one machine-checkable number that proves the seat is working, and a written split of what you decide freely versus what you bring to the Founding Designer and the founder.

The craft you must already own: a real human-computer interaction background, not a gloss of design vocabulary; a very strong design eye, proven by a live portfolio of shipped work; building interfaces in React and CSS; fluency in a design tool; and AI coding and design tools as your default way of working, checked by hand because you can do the work by hand. A bonus, not a requirement: SEO experience, meaning you understand how a search engine reads a page, how search-aware design differs from design for a person who has already arrived, and how to hold a product-strategy view through a search-traffic lens. Comparable experience we accept: a frontend engineer with real design taste and an HCI education or its equivalent, a product designer who ships their own code, or someone who built and shipped a consumer product alone and did both halves. What you'll grow into here: a design system that governs machine output, and the taste to run a design bar yourself one day.

Who You Are

How you think. You see a screen as a system: what state it's in, what it's telling the person, and where it's lying. You think about the person on the other side of the screen the way a human-computer interaction education teaches: what they're trying to do, what they can perceive, and where the interface gets in their way. You notice when you're wrong and you fix it fast, without defensiveness.

How you work. A design tool, a coding agent and a browser open together, most of the day. You use AI tools to do the mechanical part of design and code, and you check what they hand you, because you can do the work by hand and that's what lets you catch what they got wrong. You ask for the bar once, then you meet it.

What you've probably built. Real interfaces people used, that you can show live and say what you decided and why. A side project you designed and built yourself counts fully. Years matter less than the artifact, and the portfolio matters more than the resume.

Who this isn't for. This is wrong if you want to be handed finished designs to implement, or finished code to style; here both halves are yours. It's wrong if you want to own the chat agent's design strategy; that surface is the Founding Designer's now, and this seat is the SimplyCodes screens. It's wrong if you want a design manager to grow under; there is a Founding Designer to learn beside and a founder to answer to, and no management layer. It's wrong if you're senior and want a senior-scoped seat; this one is built earlier-career on purpose. You'll be happiest here if you want to get very good, very fast, on a surface where your work reaches real shoppers every day.

How We Evaluate

We don't run traditional design or engineering interviews.

Async video screen. About 15 minutes, on your own time. It replaces the recruiter screen.

Calls with company stakeholders. Short conversations with the people you'd build beside.

Conversation with the founder. How you see a screen, how you use your tools, and what you'd fix first on SimplyCodes.

Paid work trial. About a week of real work in our real environment, paid at a day rate: one SimplyCodes component or screen taken from sketch to shipped, live, inside the design system. We watch how you get grounded, how you use your tools, whether you check what they produce, and whether your self-assessment is honest.

If the work above reads like yours but your resume is unconventional, apply anyway. We hire on the work and the reasoning, not the pedigree.

Compensation & Ownership

Total first-year comp: $165,000 to $230,000 (base + performance-based ownership and profit-share programs). Base: $130,000 to $170,000.

Beyond base: eligibility for the company's ownership and profit-share programs, grants are performance-based, terms discussed at the offer stage; 100% family premium coverage; and an effectively unlimited token budget, steered by return, never capped.

Based in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, in person, five days a week.