Founding Design Engineer

Substrate builds financial infrastructure for equipment financing, a $1.3T market that still runs on manual approvals and paper. We give equipment vendors an in-house-bank capability: AI-powered underwriting, capital-as-a-service, and point-of-sale integrations. Our customers range from construction auctioneers and CNC distributors to robotics startups. We are a team of 10+ from Ramp, SpaceX, and Anthropic, backed by a $7M seed from Floodgate, Ironspring, Neo, and Steel Atlas.

We're hiring a Founding Design Engineer to lead the effort to make Substrate's products feel insanely great. You'll work at the intersection of design, product, copywriting, and full-stack engineering, shipping 0→1 experiences that power machine shops, farms, factories, construction contractors, and more.

• You believe in objective good and beauty, and you want to bring them to an antiquated, predatory industry.

• You believe not all technology is created equal. You don’t care about building another enterprise SaaS tool, you want to build tools that advance civilization.

• You want to work with people who treat their work as craft, who violently reject “just good enough,” and you want to help build that culture.

• Own the full arc from customer problem to UI/UX design to prototype to shipped product, starting with the buyer financing application, the vendor dashboard, and our internal operations console.

• Build and extend Substrate's design system: components, tokens, and patterns, and decide when to extend a shared component, add a pattern, or use a one-off.

• Build interfaces in React 19 and TypeScript (Vite, Tailwind, TanStack Query) on top of complex, legacy-heavy underlying systems, covering responsive behavior, state handling, and accessibility.

• Write product and funnel copy and iterate against funnel and drop-off analytics instrumented on every user flow.

• Implement basic backend changes yourself, such as adding fields and entities and modifying database schemas (Prisma migrations and the NestJS endpoints behind your screens).

• Build and improve agentic workflows for design and front-end development.

Qualifications

• 3+ years shipping production web interfaces.

• You can explain a problem, what you did, and what changed after launch.

• Built or extended a design system.

• Can critique a screen for hierarchy, comprehension, interaction, accessibility, and edge cases.

• Can make basic backend changes (schema changes, new fields) and are willing to learn more.

• Demonstrated clear writing, such as shown in the portfolio itself.

• growth.design is something you'd enjoy reading

• You love experimenting with tools like Mobbin and Figr

• You resonate with our engineering philosophy

Preferred skills

• Rapid prototyping in Figma or code

• Agentic workflows for design and front-end development

• Growth or conversion copywriting

• Fintech or other regulated-product UX

• Next.js

• $125-$175K base + $50,000-90,000 equity

• Best-in-class medical, dental, vision

• 401K

• Unlimited vacation

If you are interested, please apply via Dover AND email [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected] with answers to the following (less than 3 sentences each):

• If you could have one person's career arc, who would it be and why?

• What's the most insanely great thing you've ever designed? Include a link or video so we can see!

• Link to Linkedin, Github, personal page, or anything relevant about you online.

• Resume (PDF)

• You must be located within the United States for this role. If you plan to work from San Francisco where we are headquartered, please let us know. If not, please share the time zone you would work from and confirm if you can overlap with at least 6 hours within 8am-5pm Pacific Time.