[Hiring] Founding Design Engineer @Substrate
Role Description
Substrate builds financial infrastructure to grow industrial GDP. 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.
Why consider Substrate amidst your sea of options:
- 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.
What you’ll do:
- Own the full arc: from customer pain → UI/UX design → prototype → shipped product.
- Design and build beautiful, simple interfaces on top of gnarly complexity and legacy systems.
- Write growth-optimized product copy that converts users across the product funnel.
- Spin up fast, high-fidelity mockups and working prototypes to pressure-test ideas before we build.
- Help build a product culture that harmonizes speed, taste, and customer obsession.
Qualifications
- You have serious taste in UI/UX, and you can point to interfaces you've designed that prove it.
- You're a great writer.
- Growth.design is something you'd enjoy reading.
- You love LLMs.
- You've built design systems.
- You're a React wizard.
- You love experimenting with tools like Mobbin and Figr.
- You can implement basic back-end features like modifying database schemas.
- You can overlap at least 6 hours with PST working hours (8am-5pm PST).
- You resonate with our engineering philosophy.
Requirements
- Compensation: $100-$160K base + $35,000-70,000 equity.
- Fully remote.
- Unlimited PTO.
Next Steps
If you are interested, please apply via Dover AND email kelvin@joinsubstrate.com with the following (your app won't be considered without these). Keep answers to 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!
- Your current time zone and confirmation you can have 6 hours of overlap with PST working hours.
- Availability for a 30min call.