Founding Design Engineer

Background Substrate builds financial infrastructure to grow industrial GDP. We're hiring a Founding Design Engineer to lead the effort to make Substrate's products 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.

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 do:

• Own the full arc: from customer pain → UI/UX design → prototype → shipped product
• Design and build beautiful, simple interfaces on top of gnarly complexity and legacy systems
• Write growth-optimized product copy that converts users across the product funnel
• Spin up fast, high-fidelity mockups and working prototypes to pressure-test ideas before we build
• Help build a product culture that harmonizes speed, taste, and customer obsession

You’ll be a great fit if...

• You have serious taste in UI/UX, and you can point to interfaces you've designed that prove it
• You're a great writer
• growth.design is something you'd enjoy reading
• You love LLMs
• You've built design systems
• You're a React wizard
• You love experimenting with tools like Mobbin and Figr
• You can implement basic back-end features like modifying database schemas
• You resonate with our engineering philosophy

Compensation

• $125-$175K base + $50,000-90,000 equity
• Best-in-class medical, dental, vision
• 401K
• Unlimited vacation

Next Steps If you are interested, please apply via Dover AND email kelvin@joinsubstrate.com, yurii@joinsubstrate.com, nikhil@joinsubstrate.com, and jordan@joinsubstrate.com with the following (your app won't be considered without these). Keep answers to 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
• Your current time zone and confirmation you can have 6 hours of overlap with PST working hours
• Availability for a 30min call