Design Engineer Palo Alto

Design and build the design system and the interface craft behind products used by enterprises and written by agents.

Travel: Occasional travel to customer sites

Sycamore is building the trusted agent operating system for the enterprise. Our platform helps companies build, deploy, and orchestrate agentic apps that take on real operational work, with the security and control large organizations need.

We are a small, engineering-led team working directly with Fortune 500 enterprises. We have raised $65M from Coatue and Lightspeed, along with other investors and industry leaders.

Design Engineering owns the design system and the quality of the interface itself: the component libraries, the token system, motion, layout, and accessibility.

The split between design and engineering is genuinely even. Half the work is engineering, in a strict Type Script codebase where the components you write ship and get consumed. The other half is design in Figma, deciding what a surface looks like and how it behaves before any of it exists in code. We are not looking for an engineer who follows a spec, or a designer who hands one off.

It reaches past product UI, to the marketing site, launch material, and the brand underneath them, and past the screen entirely. Agents talk, and voice has almost none of the affordances a screen gives you: turn-taking and barge-in to get right, latency you cannot hide, and error recovery that has to work when the person cannot see what went wrong.

The engineering side is unusual in one specific way. Our component library ships into applications that agents generate, and nobody reviews those line by line, so a component whose interface is ambiguous gets used incorrectly at scale and silently. The interface has to be legible without documentation, the public surface is contract-tested so a breaking change fails at compile time, and consumers theme through tokens rather than forking components.

• Design product UI and UX in Figma, from the first exploration through the states, edge cases, and specifications that make it buildable.
• Build and own product surfaces across Sycamore Forge and Sycamore Guard, from the interface through the API behind it.
• Design interactions for asynchronous, streaming, long-running, and non-deterministic behavior, including partial output, interruption, and failure.
• Own the design system on both sides, keeping the Figma library and the shipped code describing the same thing.
• Design beyond the screen when it is needed, including voice interfaces for agents that speak, marketing and launch surfaces, and the brand they sit inside.
• Turn powerful platform primitives into interactions that enterprise users can understand and trust.

We design in Figma, with the design system maintained there alongside its compiled counterpart in code. Our current product environment includes React and Type Script with Tan Stack Router and Query, Zustand for state, and Tailwind;
Python cloud services on FastAPI with typed data models and PostgreSQL; server-sent events for streaming; durable workflows; and cloud-native deployment on Kubernetes.

Type Script is strict, and our component libraries are contract-tested so that a breaking change to a public interface fails at compile time rather than in a generated application. We test with Vitest and Playwright, including component harnesses and screenshot coverage, and we use coding agents, traces, evaluations, and production feedback as part of everyday engineering.

This is context, not a checklist. We do not require previous experience with every framework or library in our stack. People who understand systems,…