Product design Engineer

Who is Recruiting from Scratch

Recruiting from Scratch is a talent firm that focuses on placing the best candidates for our clients. Our team is 100% remote, and we work with companies across North America, South America, and Europe to help them build high-performing teams.

Website:

Location: San Mateo, CA
Employment Type: Full-time
Location Type: On-site
Department: Engineering & Research

We’re a frontier AI team building systems for creating interactive world simulations from natural language
. Our work sits at the intersection of multimodal AI, real‑time systems, and product design—turning cutting‑edge research into magical, shippable experiences
.

This role is for a Product Design Engineer who thrives at the boundary between UX, frontend engineering, and AI systems. You’ll take ideas from zero to one, rapidly prototype, and ship polished product experiences that expose powerful AI capabilities to users.

Own product‑level UX and full‑stack execution
, transforming research prototypes into intuitive, production‑ready experiences—quickly and with high quality.

• Design and build end‑to‑end product experiences for AI‑powered creation and simulation tools.

• Rapidly prototype, test, and iterate on new interaction patterns for AI‑driven products.

• Translate research capabilities into simple, delightful user workflows
  .

• Build and maintain design systems and UI primitives that scale with the product.

• Wire frontend experiences to model endpoints
  , experiments, feature flags, and observability.

• Own performance, polish, and reliability across the product surface.

• Collaborate closely with research and infrastructure teams in a fast‑moving, founder‑led environment.

• Strong product taste — high bar for UX quality and detail.

• Zero‑to‑one ownership mindset — comfortable shipping from ambiguity.

• Rapid prototyping ability — fast iteration without sacrificing quality.

• Willingness to work on‑site, in‑person as part of a tightly collaborative team.

• Frontend / Product stack:

  • Next.js / React
  • Tailwind CSS / shadcn
  • Edge & serverless platforms (Vercel, Cloudflare)
  • tRPC and/or GraphQL

• Experience with
  file systems, data sync, and authentication flows
  .

• Ability to integrate model APIs
  , observability hooks, feature flags, and experiment toggles.

• Strong understanding of performance budgets
  , rendering, and frontend optimization.

• Portfolio of polished AI demos shipped to production.

• Experience building and shipping design systems used by real users.

• Prior work on AI‑first products, creative tools, or interactive systems.

• Comfort operating in low‑process, fast‑evolving product environments.

• On‑site, in‑person team based in San Mateo
  .

• Small, elite group with high ownership and high standards.

• Execution‑focused, low‑meeting, builder‑driven culture.

• Intense but rewarding environment for people who want real impact.

• Build at the frontier of AI + interactive creation
  .

• Ship real products on top of cutting‑edge research.

• Own meaningful surface area and influence core product direction.

• Join early and help define how people interact with powerful AI systems.

• Base salary: $200,000 – $400,000

• Total compensation:
  Up to $1M+, depending on caliber and impact

• Compensation is highly flexible and prioritizes talent quality over cost.