SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Circleback is building an AI-powered meeting notes and search platform that serves as the operational source of truth for company conversations. The company is Y Combinator-backed, profitable, and growing virally with thousands of paying customers including PostHog, Browserbase, and Gumloop.
As Design Engineer, you will own the product surface end-to-end—from concept through pixel-perfect production code—across web (React, Next.js), desktop (Electron, Swift), and mobile (React Native). You'll work in a small, high-craft engineering team directly with founders on product direction.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design and implement features across all platforms without handoffs between design and engineering
- Establish and codify Circleback's design system, ensuring consistency across web, Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android
- Solve complex design challenges around dense, conversational information to make navigation effortless
- Craft interactions, animations, and transitions that make the product feel fast and responsive
- Obsess over details: loading states, empty states, error states, keyboard shortcuts, hover treatments, drag interactions
- Iterate rapidly on experiments around onboarding, activation, and user education
- Prototype new ideas quickly in code to evaluate interactions in practice
- Shape product direction by working directly with engineers and founders
Longer-term, you'll help invent new interfaces for proactively organizing and surfacing context across 500+ seat deployments, and design flexible primitives (tables, charts, workflows) for Circleback's evolution into a horizontal operational platform. There's a path to leading the design function as it grows.
The role values shipping fast with high quality, building software people love, and maintaining craft at an exceptional level. You'll iterate on animation curves, notice 3px padding differences, and have strong opinions about typography and spacing backed by reasoning.
QUALIFICATIONS:
- Designer who codes or engineer with exceptional taste; ability to take ideas from sketch to shipped product independently
- Portfolio or shipped work demonstrating design engineering capability
- Experience building things for fun and shipping products end-to-end
- Strong opinions and articulate reasoning about typography, color, spacing, and interaction design
- Fast and pragmatic; prefer shipping great work today over perfect work next month
- Excited about AI as both a product tool and workflow tool (Cursor, Claude Code, etc.)
- Understanding of making powerful tools without compromising simplicity
- Ability to keep broad customer perspectives in mind while designing
