Design Engineer

Grit is on a mission to crush technical debt.

We believe that a big challenge in the next decade will be crumbling digital infrastructure. Our entire modern economy runs on code, but we haven’t developed appropriate tools to ensure software remains reliable over time.

Companies know that technical debt threatens the reliability of their services and slows down the pace of innovation, but struggle to find enough engineering talent to fix issues—most software maintenance today is still done manually and delayed as long as possible.

We believe there is a better way: we’re building AI bots that automatically maintain software through a combination of static analysis, our own query language, and machine learning.

Founders Fund and Abstract Ventures led our $7M seed round and we have many paying customers on our beta product. Our team is currently 5 engineers.

You will lead design for Grit, working closely with the founder and other engineers to conceptualize interfaces for programming the future. Your work will answer questions like:

• When most code is machine-generated, what do new developer interfaces look like?
• How do we teach developers a new way of programming?
• What is the most effective way to educate the next generation of developers in an ML-first world?
• How can program graphs be represented with less complexity, allowing rapid comprehension?
• What parts of the developer experience should still be artisanal when software is built at industrial scale?

Your work will consist of building interactive prototypes, including designing new concepts from scratch and implementing your ideas with code. Yes, we know that’s rare—since this is a developer product, we find developers have the best intuitions for how to design it.

• Design new interfaces for analyzing source code and managing the software development lifecycle.
• Contribute to, maintain, and ultimately use our Figma/React component library to streamline new interfaces.
• Prototype new UI interactions and write CSS/JS to turn your ideas into code.

• Experience designing creative application interfaces demonstrated in a strong portfolio.
• You have demonstrated experience writing CSS and JavaScript/TypeScript.
• Execution-driven mindset: you love shipping.
• Interest in programming languages (ex. compilers) or machine learning is a plus, but not required. You’ll learn more on the job!
• Comfortable working in low-structure environments and navigating unknown unknowns.

• Build a meaningful product to solve a tangible problem for companies.
• Ownership in all senses of the word: significant equity upside, direct impact on product vision, and contact with users.
• Solve your own problems. We dogfood our own product and you can build the ideal developer experience as you work.
• Explore frontiers in programming languages and machine learning.
• We have a long runway and can offer a competitive base salary (up to $250k).

We believe that the most impactful work is done through high bandwidth in-person collaboration, particularly at an early-stage company. Most of the team works from our NYC office, near Union Square. Exceptions are possible for candidates with a demonstrated track record in related fields.

⚡ If this role sounds interesting to you, please apply below.

Even if you’re not quite sure, we encourage you to apply anyway.