Design Engineer

Doing product research online feels harder than ever. AI promised better information. Instead it flooded the web with hallucinations, generated content, and confident-sounding answers that have no idea what's true.
Product.ai is building the truth engine for shopping. When every other AI tool summarizes and guesses, we verify. Not opinions. Not averages. Ground truth.
Self-funded and profitable for over a decade, we're a team of e-commerce veterans who have been building commerce truth systems at scale. Over a billion dollars in annual transaction volume. Millions of customers served. Product.ai is our flagship - the new starting point for shopping in the AI era. We're in early alpha, building alongside our community of domain experts.
We are seeking a Design Engineer who designs in code - someone whose prototypes ship, whose taste overrides mockups, and whose engineering instincts catch performance nightmares before they land. At Product.ai, the most important interactions - verification state changes, confidence indicators, real-time claim validation - need to be felt before they can be specified. You're the person who makes them real.
Based in Santa Monica. Hybrid schedule with flexibility. For the right builder, we're open to remote.
What You Will Build

• Cross-Surface Interaction. Our experience spans web app (human-facing) and agent-native surfaces (JSON-LD, MCP protocol). You'll ensure that interaction patterns designed for human fingers also inform how structured data is organized for AI agents. When a verification state transition feels right to a user clicking through the web app, the underlying data structure carries that same logic to an agent consuming our API. Information hierarchy and interaction design are two expressions of the same truth.
• Consumer Product Experience. The core web experience (smartphones first) with our AI shopping agent at its heart. You'll design AND implement how verification signals become interactions - how state changes feel, how transitions communicate confidence versus uncertainty, how users navigate between hunt mode and validation mode. The core interaction is watching an AI verify a product claim in real time and showing you the evidence. The feel of that interaction is the product differentiator.
• Interactive Prototyping Pipeline. You'll build the bridge between design exploration and production code. When the design team needs to test a new verification flow, you build a working prototype in hours, not days. When engineering needs to understand a complex interaction, your prototype IS the spec. At Product.ai, the prototype is often the first draft of production code.
• Design System Components. You'll own the living component library that the entire front-end team builds on. Not just visual components - interactive components with real state management, responsive behavior, and accessibility built in. The verification confidence indicator. The real-time claim status animation. The evidence drawer that shows sources. These components need to feel right at every breakpoint, in every state, at every speed.

Who You Are

• You design in code and your taste drives engineering decisions. Your prototypes are real enough to ship. You think in React components, CSS transitions, and state machines. You've built interactions that designers couldn't have specified - because the feel only emerged through building. You care about how a 200ms delay between states feels different from a 350ms delay, how a drawer opens, how a confidence score fades in. Your PRs include interaction decisions, not just functional code.
• You ship fast and iterate in public. You push component prototypes early, get feedback from designers and engineers, and iterate based on what you learn. You know the difference between technical debt and strategic shortcuts. You've shipped interactions that were 80% right, measured the response, and iterated to 95% in production.
• You're deeply technical in front-end engineering. React state management at scale. CSS that works across breakpoints without hacks. Browser rendering performance. Animation frame budgets. You've optimized a UI interaction that was janky at 60fps and found the rendering bottleneck that nobody else could see. Front-end performance IS user experience.
• You use AI as a force multiplier for iteration speed. You generate component variations with AI. You test responsive behavior across breakpoints faster because AI handles the mechanical parts. You're clear-eyed about when AI output is generic and when it genuinely accelerates your workflow. You're not ideological about it. You're practical.
• You have product judgment, not just craft skill. You can distinguish between "this interaction is beautiful" and "this interaction helps the user trust the system." You push back on designs that look good but create poor interactions. You've built the alternative that was better. You care about the user feeling right, not the code looking clever.

Ownership
We operate as a high-performance studio, not a typical corporation. Every builder at Product.ai is a partner, not an employee collecting a paycheck.

• Base: $120,000 - $180,000. Competitive for the role level. Your base covers your life; your ownership builds your freedom.
• Equity: You receive a formal ownership stake via Profits Interest Units (PIUs) - Class B Membership Interests with a $0 strike price. Not options. Not RSUs. Actual ownership that participates in the upside from day one and qualifies for Capital Gains tax treatment.
• Profit Sharing: You participate in the company's annual success. As an equity holder, you receive a pro-rata share of Free Cash Flow (FCF) - real cash, every year, not a promise tied to a future exit.
• Liquidity: We operate an Annual Tender Offer where the company buys back vested interests at fair market value. You can turn ownership into cash every year. No waiting for an IPO. No hoping for an acquisition.
• Benefits: 100% premium coverage for you and your family, daily catered lunches, and unlimited PTO that we actually expect you to use.

How to Apply
We skip the 60-minute recruiter screen. Instead, you'll answer a few short video questions so we can get to know how you think and work. Less time than a phone screen, and you can do it whenever works for you.
The Process:

Click Apply.

Record short video responses to our questions (no prep required - we want to see how you naturally think).

Your responses go directly to the hiring team. No ATS. No keyword parsing.

We're not looking for polished presentations. We're looking for signal on who you are.