Founding Design Engineer

The role

The Founding Design Engineer owns the full visual and interactive experience of Jinba's platform. You will build a design system from the ground up and ship production code alongside the engineering team.

What you will do

• Design and build Jinba's design system including components, tokens, patterns, and documentation
• Own UI/UX for core product surfaces from concept through implementation
• Create motion design that guides users through workflow creation and execution
• Write clean, maintainable frontend code
• Collaborate directly with engineering to ship features
• Establish design processes and standards

Required qualifications

• Strong product design sense with portfolio showing end-to-end ownership
• Experience building or significantly contributing to a design system
• Motion design ability
• Proficient in React/TypeScript
• Familiar with component libraries like shadcn/ui, Radix, or similar
• Understanding of design tokens, CSS architecture, and scalable frontend patterns
• Experience with developer tools, no-code platforms, or workflow/automation products
• Comfort designing complex interfaces: canvas editors, drag-and-drop builders, multi-step flows
• Ability to simplify dense functionality without dumbing it down

Nice to have

• Design engineer or founding designer roles at early-stage startups
• Experience at companies like Figma, Linear, Notion, Retool, Vercel, or similar dev/productivity tools
• Built a design system from scratch at a growing company
• Background combining design and engineering

About the company

Jinba helps large enterprises build automated workflows using plain English. It is a YC W26 company with an international team across SF and Tokyo.