Design Engineer

We're looking for a design engineer who obsesses over how software looks and feels to join us in San Francisco. You'll own the product surface end-to-end–from concept to pixel-perfect production code–and make Circleback's design go from really good to elite.

Design is core to Circleback’s strategy. We’re product-led, and one of the hardest problems we have is making something powerful enough for sophisticated teams while still feeling simple and intuitive to anyone who opens it.

You’ll have a huge amount of ownership over what Circleback looks and feels like. One of your first priorities will be establishing and codifying our design system, then carrying it consistently across web, Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android. You’ll work directly with a small engineering team that cares deeply about craft and wants to push the product bar higher.

From there, the problems get much more open-ended. We already have customers with 500+ seats using Circleback to search and reference what’s been said across their company. The next step is helping them make sense of all of that context without having to go looking for it: proactively organizing, synthesizing, and surfacing what matters. There isn’t an established interface for this yet.

You’ll help invent it.

Longer term, Circleback is becoming much more than a meeting note‑taker. We’re building the operational source of truth for a team: a horizontal product that can understand and represent everything from a candidate or customer to a project or decision across dozens of conversations. That means designing flexible primitives like tables, charts, and workflows, while figuring out how those building blocks should adapt to completely different kinds of work.

You’ll also work on growth and because Circleback grows through the product itself, seemingly small improvements to onboarding, activation, and collaboration can have an outsized impact on the business.

And this role can grow with the company. As we build out the design function, there’s a path to leading it: identifying what we need next, shaping how design operates at Circleback, and eventually building the team around you.

We're looking for a design engineer who obsesses over how software looks and feels to join us in San Francisco. You'll own the product surface end-to-end–from concept to pixel-perfect production code–and make Circleback's design go from really good to elite.

Most companies split design and engineering into separate roles, separate teams, separate conversations. We don't want that. We want one person who can look at a feature, know how it should work, open Figma, open their editor, and ship it. No handoff. No fidelity gap. What you design is what users get.

Circleback Already Has a Product That Customers Love. Your Job Is To Take That Foundation And Push It To The Level Of The Best-designed Software In The World. That Means

• Own the design and frontend implementation of features across web (React, Next.js), desktop (Electron, Swift), and mobile (React Native)
• Deeply understand customer problems and find elegant ways to solve them–Circleback deals in dense, conversational information, and making that feel effortless to navigate is a genuinely hard design problem
• Craft interactions, animations, and transitions that make the product feel fast and alive
• Build and evolve our design system–components, patterns, tokens–so quality scales as we ship faster
• Sweat the details other people skip: loading states, empty states, error states, keyboard shortcuts, hover treatments, the feel of a drag interaction
• Iterate quickly on experiments around onboarding, activation, and education
• Work directly with engineers and founders on product direction–you’ll shape what we build, not just how it looks
• Prototype new ideas quickly in code, not just mockups–the best way to evaluate an interaction is to use it

You’re a designer who codes or an engineer with exceptional taste–either way, you can take an idea from sketch to shipped product without waiting on anyone else. You build things for fun. You’ve done this before, and you have a portfolio or shipped work that shows it.

You…