Design Engineer (Intern)

Background Substrate builds financial infrastructure for equipment financing, a $1.3T market that still runs on manual approvals and paper. We give equipment vendors an in-house-bank capability: AI-powered underwriting, capital-as-a-service, and point-of-sale integrations. Our customers range from construction auctioneers and CNC distributors to robotics startups. We are a team of 10+ from Ramp, SpaceX, and Anthropic, backed by a $7M seed from Floodgate, Ironspring, Neo, and Steel Atlas. We're hiring a Design Engineering Intern to help make Substrate's products look and feel insanely great. You'll work at the intersection of design, product, copywriting, and full-stack engineering, shipping 0→1 experiences that power machine shops, farms, factories, construction contractors, and more. Substrate engineering interns have immense ownership to lead full-stack product cycles end-to-end, from customer discovery to production deployment. You'll get to occasionally travel with the founder to factory floors, meet Main Street manufacturers and Wall Street lenders face-to-face, and build exactly what the field demands. Given the technical complexity of our product and the high degree of ownership we trust interns with, we've found engineers typically take 6-8 weeks to fully onboard and lead their own projects. Therefore, we require candidates who can commit to an internship for at least 8 months. We occasionally make exceptions for those who are truly exceptional.

Why consider Substrate amidst your sea of options:

• You believe in objective good and beauty, and you want to bring them to an antiquated, predatory industry.
• You believe not all technology is created equal. You don’t care about building another enterprise SaaS tool, you want to build tools that advance civilization.
• You want to work with people who treat their work as craft, who violently reject “just good enough,” and you want to help build that culture.

What you'll build

• Own the full arc from customer problem to UI/UX design to prototype to shipped product, starting with the buyer financing application, the vendor dashboard, and our internal operations console.
• Build and extend Substrate's design system: components, tokens, and patterns, and decide when to extend a shared component, add a pattern, or use a one-off.
• Build interfaces in React 19 and TypeScript (Vite, Tailwind, TanStack Query) on top of complex, legacy-heavy underlying systems, covering responsive behavior, state handling, and accessibility.
• Write product and funnel copy and iterate against funnel and drop-off analytics instrumented on every user flow.
• Implement basic backend changes yourself, such as adding fields and entities and modifying database schemas (Prisma migrations and the NestJS endpoints behind your screens).
• Build and improve agentic workflows for design and front-end development.

Qualifications

• Experience shipping production web interfaces.
• A portfolio of shipped work you personally designed and built.
• You can explain a problem, what you did, and what changed after launch.
• Built or extended a design system.
• Can critique a screen for hierarchy, comprehension, interaction, accessibility, and edge cases.
• Can make basic backend changes (schema changes, new fields) and are willing to learn more.
• Demonstrated clear writing, such as shown in the portfolio itself.
• growth.design is something you'd enjoy reading
• You love experimenting with tools like Mobbin and Figr
• You resonate with our engineering philosophy

Preferred skills

• Rapid prototyping in Figma or code
• Agentic workflows for design and front-end development
• Growth or conversion copywriting
• Fintech or other regulated-product UX
• Next.js

Next Steps If you are interested, please apply via Dover AND email yurii@joinsubstrate.com, nikhil@joinsubstrate.com, and jordan@joinsubstrate.com with answers to the following (less than 3 sentences each):

• If you could have one person's career arc, who would it be and why?
• What's the most insanely great thing you've ever designed? Include a link or video so we can see!
• Link to Linkedin, Github, personal page, or anything relevant about you online.
• Resume (PDF)
• We require a minimum internship duration of 8 months. Please confirm your intended start date and internship length.
• We are headquartered in San Francisco and you are welcome to work with us in-person, however, this is not a requirement and you may work fully remote. Please share your intended work location, time zone you would work from, and confirm if you can overlap with at least 6 hours within 8am-5pm Pacific Time.