Founding Design Engineer

About the role

Lightsage builds infrastructure for the emerging agent economy, helping organizations track, benchmark, and improve how coding agents discover and use their APIs, CLIs, and MCP integrations. The platform is used by enterprises and high-growth startups to become the default tools recommended by software agents. Lightsage focuses on agent experience and measurable impact on developer and product adoption, with more information available at lightsage.com. The team also created DevToolArena.com, a public benchmark that ranks developer tools across areas such as authentication, inference, and voice using Claude Code and Codex.

This is a full‑time, on‑site role based in San Francisco, CA.

Responsibilities

• Designing and building product interfaces
• Creating interactive prototypes
• Developing reusable components
• Establishing a scalable design system
• Continuously refining the product experience
• Working across agent analytics, data visualizations, onboarding, dashboards, and customer‑facing recommendations
• Translating complex technical data into clear and actionable experiences
• Establishing Lightsage's design and frontend standards
• Making decisions about interaction patterns, component architecture, performance, and visual consistency as the product scales

Qualifications

• 2–3+ years of experience in frontend engineering, design engineering, or a similar role, ideally at an early‑stage or high‑growth software company
• Strong proficiency in React, TypeScript, HTML, CSS, and modern frontend development frameworks such as Next.js
• Exceptional visual design and interaction design skills, with a strong eye for typography, spacing, layout, motion, and attention to detail
• Experience designing and implementing polished, responsive, and performant user interfaces from concept through production
• Ability to translate Figma designs into high‑quality code and independently design interfaces when no mockups exist
• Experience building reusable components, design systems, and scalable frontend architectures
• Familiarity with data visualization, dashboards, developer tools, or complex technical workflows
• Strong understanding of frontend performance, accessibility, responsive design, and cross‑browser compatibility
• Ability to prototype rapidly, iterate based on customer feedback, and balance design quality with engineering constraints
• High ownership, dependable execution, and comfort operating in an early‑stage startup with minimal structure
• Please include a link to your portfolio, GitHub, or examples of products and interfaces you've designed and built