Design Engineer

You'll be the second designer at Sage Ox, partnering closely with our Founding Designer — not joining a design org, not reporting into one. Before you apply, read her post about what this actually feels like
. It's the most honest preview of this role that exists, including the uncomfortable parts.

We're not looking for another generalist. We want a T-shaped designer
: exceptional at one thing — good enough to take part of our product somewhere none of us could have imagined — and strong enough to play across everything else. In the AI era, someone who is a rock star in one area can push out and have real influence in the others.

Sage Ox doesn't live on one screen. It lives in the product people use every day, on the conference room screen a whole team looks at together, and in hardware that sits on the table. You'll design and build across all of it, along with the agentic design harness that lets every AI coworker on the team build the way you would.

And you'll push us. We want someone who tells us we aren't thinking ambitiously enough about the experience — then ships the version that proves it.

These are shipping surfaces, not concepts on a roadmap, and most of them have no obvious precedent.

• Design features end to end, from your own user research to the shipped experience — web, desktop, mobile, CLI. Designers here write the production code. If you can't build it, the design doesn't ship.

• Memory you can walk up to. What a team has said, decided, and built. Designing retrieval people trust — where a claim came from, what an AI coworker actually read — is an information-design problem worthy of Tufte.

• Ambient coordination. Murmurs — small signals from your coworkers, human and AI, that reach you without becoming another notification you resent.

• How people grow into Sage Ox. We're breaking trail on human–AI collaboration, so the learning curve is part of the product: how people start, what nudges them next, and how they get more value over time.

• Talk to users, and use Sage Ox daily. Everyone here does. Design from lived use.

• A room, cast to a screen. A live conversation on the TV everyone is already looking at, legible from across the room. Different rules than anything designed for arm's length.

• A living mural. A meeting draws itself as it happens, in front of everyone in the room. What should a thought look like thirty seconds after someone says it? Nobody knows yet.

• The room as a surface. What a meeting room becomes when a team's memory and its AI coworkers are present in it, and how everyone in it can see and steer what's happening.

• A device with almost no screen. The Ox Dot sits on the table and gives the hivemind a body in the room. Its whole vocabulary is presence, light, and sound. Every instinct you've built for a rectangle is the wrong instinct here.

• Sage Ox in the real world. Packaging, unboxing, first run, and pairing — every moment someone holds something of ours in their hands.

• What comes next. A watch, new devices, and whatever we decide to build after that. Work out what our patterns become on each one, and lead those builds.

• Own the design system. Components, tokens, patterns, and states across every surface above, built in code, with accessibility built in so every feature inherits it.

• Make it readable by AI coworkers. Docs, skills, and rules that Claude Code reaches for before it invents something new. When an AI coworker gets it wrong, treat that as a gap in the harness and close it. Our litmus test: can a future AI coworker read the UI's state, change it correctly, and confirm the result with no human in the loop?

• Catch drift before users do. Turn design rules…