Founding Design Engineer

About

We’re building the future of storytelling and video editing. We’re a small team that moves fast and builds things we’re proud of. We care obsessively about taste: in design, in product, in every detail.

The Role

We’re hiring a Founding Design Engineer: a great frontend engineer with real taste, who doesn’t need a designer holding their hand to get something out the door. You design it, you build it, you ship it.

The split is roughly 60% growth, 40% product.

On the growth side you own marketing sites, launch assets, one-pagers, and small standalone apps — end to end, including the bit of backend and API wiring it takes to make them real.

On the product side you own how Cardboard feels: onboarding, the chat experience, micro-interactions, and the details throughout the app. How a panel opens and closes. What the curve on that animation should be. You’ll also write the design.md files and interface guidelines that let the rest of the team — and our agents — hold the same bar.

What You’ll Actually Do

• Own craft across growth: microsites, landing pages, launch moments, blog, and the marketing surface. Make people stop and pay attention.
• Run growth experiments end to end. Design them, build them, ship them, learn from what works, and kill what doesn’t.
• Build the interactions, animations, and micro-interactions that make the product feel alive — onboarding, chat, the editor timeline, and the polished elements throughout the app.
• Write shaders into our rendering engine when an effect calls for it. The engine is a plug-and-play system: you write the fragment and vertex shader, it handles the rest. You don’t need to know how the whole engine works.
• Build reusable components and push the quality bar for everything that touches the surface, while respecting the user’s device constraints.
• Write great design.md files. Set interface guidelines for the team and our agents, in the spirit of interfaces.rauno.me.
• Raise our accessibility standards.
• Wire up API endpoints when the work demands it.

Who You Are

• You have taste, and your work shows it. We will look at what you’ve shipped and at how much care went into it.
• You have deep knowledge of easing and timing. Ease-out, ease-in-out, linear: you know when and why. You have opinions about 80ms vs 300ms.
• You’re strong in React and TypeScript, and fluent with a motion library — Motion, Framer Motion, or GSAP.
• You’ve worked on real products, not just marketing pages. You can talk about the product decisions behind your work, not only the visual ones.
• You’re obsessed with frontend performance and can profile and fix a bottleneck rather than guess at it.
• You think in experiments. You have a growth instinct for what makes people stop, click, and share, and you’ll ship a microsite or a launch moment as happily as an in-product interaction.
• You keep a lab: experiments, small open-source tools, components, or writing about what you’ve figured out. We’d love a link.

Nice To Have

• Shaders. You should know what a shader is and be able to use one — GLSL, Three.js, WebGL. Writing your own custom shaders is something you can learn here.
• Browser storage and streaming primitives (OPFS, Cache Storage, cache headers) for working with large media.
• Excitement about WebGPU and where it’s going.

What You Get

• Competitive salary and founding-team equity.
• Unlimited tokens across every AI model.
• A healthy budget for AI tools and any peripherals you need to do your best work.