Staff Designer, Rapid Prototyping

What You’ll Do

• Build functional prototypes and product experiments directly in the Thunderbolt codebase.
• Translate ambiguous product ideas, user workflows, partner feedback, and enterprise needs into clear, usable product experiences.
• Help define interaction patterns for AI-powered chat, search, research, workflow automation, knowledge retrieval, and enterprise administration.
• Use AI-assisted development tools to accelerate prototyping and implementation while maintaining strong judgment around quality, usability, security, accessibility, and maintainability.
• Partner closely with product, design, engineering, and enterprise-facing teams to explore, validate, and refine product direction.
• Contribute production-quality front-end code where appropriate.
• Identify when a prototype should be discarded, refined, generalized, or productionized.
• Improve the usability, accessibility, consistency, and polish of the Thunderbolt user experience.
• Help develop reusable components, interface patterns, or design-system elements that create leverage for the broader product team.
• Bring a user-centered perspective to technical and product discussions, especially where AI behavior, user trust, transparency, permissions, or workflow clarity are important.
• Consider enterprise needs when designing product experiences, including data sensitivity, user control, administrative visibility, auditability, and security expectations.
• Contribute to a product culture that values speed, clarity, experimentation, maintainability, responsible AI use, and thoughtful user experience.

What You Bring

• 10+ years of relevant experience in design engineering, front-end engineering, UX engineering, product design with strong technical implementation experience, or a closely related role, with demonstrated leadership and impact beyond individual deliverables.
• Strong front-end engineering skills, including experience with modern JavaScript or TypeScript, component-based frameworks, and building prototypes or production features directly in an application codebase.
• Strong product and interaction design judgment, including usability, accessibility, information architecture, workflow design, and product polish.
• Experience designing, prototyping, or building AI-enabled product experiences, such as chat, search, research tools, agents, automation, knowledge interfaces, or workflow tools where user trust, context, output quality, and human oversight are central to the experience.
• Experience translating ambiguous product concepts into usable workflows, prototypes, and shipped product experiences, with the judgment to balance speed, quality, maintainability, learning, and product risk.
• Experience providing technical or product leadership through mentoring, cross-functional coordination, reusable patterns, project ownership, or influence beyond individual deliverables.
• Practical awareness of AI, privacy, security, and regulatory considerations that may affect product experience, including transparency, user control, permissions, data handling, and trust; familiarity with frameworks such as the EU AI Act, Cyber Resilience Act, HIPAA, or comparable responsible AI, privacy, and security requirements.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, including experience working closely with product managers, designers, engineers, and other cross-functional stakeholders.
• Portfolio, case studies, shipped work, or examples demonstrating design-to-code execution, interactive prototypes, or product experience improvements.
• Bonus points for Experience with enterprise software, developer tools, productivity tools, collaboration tools, self-hosted software, or other technical user workflows.
• Experience contributing to design systems, component libraries, reusable front-end architecture, or shared product interaction patterns.
• Familiarity with user research, usability testing, product discovery, feature instrumentation, or rapid experimentation methods.
• Experience working in open-source or highly collaborative engineering environments.