Design Engineer

Overview

Kya is building AI-powered customer success agents that help onboard, activate, and grow customer accounts, freeing teams to focus on relationships and making customer success a growth engine. The company values high craft, strong taste, and fast execution, with a belief that work should center on thinking and building rather than repetitive busywork.

Role

As a founding Design Engineer in New York City, you will shape both the look and the feel of the product. This role sits at the intersection of design and frontend development, and you will turn early ideas into polished interfaces, ship the work yourself, and help define interaction patterns for a product category that is still being invented. You will collaborate closely with the founders, move quickly from concept to production, and establish the quality bar for the team.

What you'll do

• Create and implement product experiences end to end, spanning interaction design, visual design, and production-ready frontend code.
• Define new collaboration patterns for how humans and agents surface work, review it, approve it, and pass it back.
• Own the design system and component library so the product remains fast, coherent, and visually strong as it scales.
• Build rapid prototypes to test ideas, then refine the successful ones into shipped product features.
• Pay attention to the details that shape quality, including motion, responsiveness, empty states, and other subtle interactions.
• Use the product internally while building it and feed those learnings back into improvements.

What we're looking for

• A hands-on builder who can both design and code, taking a feature from concept to launch without relying on a handoff.
• Strong frontend development ability with React, TypeScript, and modern CSS, plus an understanding of performance considerations.
• Excellent product judgment and visual taste, with the ability to understand the purpose of a feature before implementing it.
• A strong preference for shipping quickly and iterating thoughtfully, knowing when to refine further and when to move on.
• Real enthusiasm for AI agents and for joining an early-stage company in this space.

Nice to have

• Background as an early or founding designer or engineer at a startup.
• Very strong design taste.
• Frequent use of AI-assisted design and coding tools such as Figma, Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex.
• Experience creating and maintaining a design system from the ground up.
• Examples of past work, side projects, or shipped products that can be reviewed.

Compensation and benefits

The role offers a compensation package of $110k-$160k plus equity.

• Competitive cash and equity package
• Health and dental insurance
• Lunch and dinner provided
• In-person working environment

Additional information

Department: Engineering. Location: New York City. Employment type: Full-time. This is an onsite position.