Design Engineer

+ Equity3/5

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Our take

Design engineer at a YC startup building AI personas for enterprise market research. Interesting challenge — how do you design an interface that makes simulated human opinions feel credible?

Job description

This is a founding design hire. You'll be the first dedicated designer at Artificial Societies, reporting directly to our Co-founder & CTO. You'll have an outsized impact on how our product looks, feels, and works - and how the world perceives our brand.

We're looking for someone who is a designer first. Someone with exceptional taste, craft, and a portfolio that speaks for itself, but who thinks and executes like an engineer. You're comfortable translating vision into working software, whether that means writing code yourself or leveraging AI tools.

What You'll Do

Own the product design end-to-end — from early concept and exploration through to polished, production-ready interfaces. You'll define how users experience our platform and shape new product features from the ground up.

Own our brand and visual language — working alongside an external design agency to build and evolve a distinctive, cohesive identity across every touchpoint.

Build what you design — write front-end code or use AI-assisted development tools to bring your work to life. We value designers who close the gap between mockup and implementation.

Explore new ways of doing things — experiment with novel interaction patterns, data visualisations, and interfaces that make complex AI-driven insights feel intuitive and accessible.

Set the bar for design culture — as the first design hire, you'll establish the standards, systems, and workflows that scale with us.

What We're Looking For

An outstanding portfolio. Show us your work. We care about taste, range, and evidence of end-to-end ownership.

Designer who thinks like an engineer. You understand technical constraints, reason about systems, and can have a productive conversation with a backend engineer about data models or API design.

Comfortable building — whether that's front-end development (React, HTML/CSS, etc.) or working fluently with AI coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor or v0. Willingness and aptitude matter more than current skill.

Deeply curious and willing to learn. AI tools are evolving fast. You're excited by that, not threatened by it, and you actively integrate new tools into your workflow.

Early-stage mindset. You thrive with ambiguity, move fast, and take ownership. You're energised by the opportunity to define something from scratch.

Logistics

Location: London, in-office

Equity: Up to 0.5% — this is a founding role and you'll be rewarded like one

Why Join Now

You'd be joining a lean, ambitious team at the earliest stage — backed by world-class investors, solving a genuinely novel problem at the intersection of AI and human behaviour.

About Artificial Societies

AI personas simulating stakeholder opinions for enterprise decisions

yc ai b2b

societies.io

Interested in this role?

Apply directly on Artificial Societies's careers page.

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