Design Engineer

Era is building the AI orchestration layer for physical devices, and that means designing and building experiences that span a mobile app, web-based portals and dashboards, and an ever-expanding universe of hardware form factors. This is a role for someone who designs in code and ships to production.

We've raised $10M+ from Abstract, Topology, BoxGroup, Betaworks, Collab Fund, and Mozilla Ventures.

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The Role

Era's product surface is unlike anything else out there. There's our consumer app, Era's public websites, our partner and internal dashboards, and then the devices themselves: speakers, hearables, pendants, trinkets, and forms that don't exist yet. You'll design and build the experience across all of it.

This is a Design Engineer role in the fullest sense. You're not a designer who dabbles in code, and you're not an engineer who tolerates design reviews - you're the person who takes an interaction from a half-formed idea to a shipped, polished, production-quality build, with no handoff in the middle. You'll spend as much time in the codebase as in design tools, and for you the two were never really separate.

This is an experience-led company. You won't be handed specs by a PM. You'll shape what we build, why, and especially how it feels - then write the code that makes it real.

What You'll Do

• Own interactions end to end, from concept and prototype through the production code that ships to users
• Write front-end UI code across platforms, in our codebase, obsessing over animation, timing, layout, and the details most people never notice but everyone feels
• Build fluid, performant animations and micro-interactions in code, not just mockups - if it moves, you made it move
• Work in the code daily alongside the rest of engineering: you're in the code reviews, the architecture discussions, and the tradeoff conversations, shipping PRs of your own
• Build and maintain a living design system as actual coded components, flexible enough to work across mobile, web, and wildly different hardware contexts
• Design and build the flows that make device setup, AI customization, and cross-device intelligence feel effortless
• Design and build the partner-facing experiences - how partners create AI personalities, curate experiences, and deploy to device fleets
• Prototype interaction patterns for new device categories in code as partners bring them to us, and turn the ones that work into shipped product
• Drive product direction through what you make - define what we build next based on user research, partner feedback, and your own vision

What We're Looking For

• You design and you code, and you'd be unhappy giving up either. You ship production front-end (React / TypeScript / Swift) and hold yourself to an engineer's bar for quality
• A portfolio and a body of shipped work - interfaces you both designed and built, ideally with live examples we can look at
• Deep craft in motion and interaction: you can build a beautiful animation in code and explain exactly why every curve and duration is what it is
• You think in systems, not screens - component libraries, tokens, and patterns that scale across products and platforms
• Comfort designing and building for contexts you can't fully control, from quick coded prototypes to polished shipping surfaces
• Experience with or strong interest in AI-powered interfaces
• Strong collaboration instincts with engineers - because you are one
• You want to lead product, not just execute on it

Nice to Have

• Experience building companion apps for hardware products
• Background in voice UX, conversational design, or multimodal interaction
• Experience shipping B2B2C products
• HCI background, or experience with user research in emerging technology
• Personal projects - interactive prototypes, physical computing, creative coding, shaders, generative work - anything that shows you build for the joy of it

You at Era

You're the person who can't leave an interaction alone until it feels right, and who would rather think in prototypes. You care about the last 10% - the easing on a transition, the way a screen responds to a touch, the moment a device wakes up - and you have the engineering ability to actually deliver it.

You're happiest with wide scope and high ownership. You'll help define what Era feels like across every surface, from a phone in someone's hand to a speaker on a shelf to hardware nobody has invented yet. You move fast, you sweat the details, and you'd rather ship something real and refine it by living on it than perfect it in a file. You're excited to shape a product - and a company - at the stage where the choices you make actually stick.

SF. We have teams in SF and Australia. Competitive salary, healthcare, and meaningful equity.