Design Engineer (Senior / Staff / Principal)
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 10, 2026. First seen by Alion on Sep 25, 2026.
Role Summary
Gym Class is a top-rated social game on Meta Quest - millions of downloads, 79,000+ reviews, 4.9. We’re backed by a16z and Y Combinator, alongside sports partners and investors including the NBA, the Golden State Warriors, and athletes like Kevin Durant, Andre Iguodala, Lonzo Ball, Danny Green, and Zaza Pachulia.
This year we’re taking things to the next level - both scaling in virtual reality, and expanding our social games platform to mobile.
We’re hiring a Founding Design Engineer (a product designer who ships production code) to own our consumer UI across both our upcoming mobile app and the web surfaces inside our flagship VR app. This person loves to move fast from Figma → React, set a high quality bar, and has shipped viral consumer apps - including the product loops that drive retention, engagement, and sharing. They’ve also established early design functions at startups: systems, standards, and processes.
At Gym Class, you’ll join a world-class team that ships quickly (and has built massively viral consumer products before), in a product where your work gets immediate feedback from a highly engaged community - in-game and on TikTok/YouTube - while building at the intersection of consumer social + gaming + AI. If this sounds like your next challenge, apply and share some of the consumer apps you’ve shipped.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
Own 0→1 → production: Take ambiguous ideas + player feedback and ship polished experiences - sketch → Figma → production React.
Build growth-critical surfaces: Onboarding, identity/profiles, discovery, social loops (invites/sharing), chat, spectating, and UX to drive feedback loops for our AI systems across mobile web + in-VR web.
Drive the roadmap: Identify highest-leverage problems, write the plan, make the calls, and deliver - balancing speed, craft, and metrics.
Create a system that ships: Build a real design system in Figma + code (components, tokens, patterns) so the product stays consistent as we scale.
Make it feel great: Hit performance targets (startup time, smooth interactions, 60fps feel) across mobile + VR constraints.
Close the loop with data: Instrument events, run lightweight tests, ship iterations weekly, and improve activation, retention, engagement, and sharing.
QUALIFICATIONS - you are…
A true designer-who-codes: 3-6+ years building consumer web products, with a portfolio showing you owned both design + implementation.
Consumer-social native: You’ve shipped mainstream UX and you intuit what makes products feel effortless, sticky, and shareable. Built/optimized viral loops (invites/referrals, sharing, UGC, social graphs, discovery/feed surfaces).
Front-end excellent: Strong in React + TypeScript, modern HTML/CSS (responsive, animation, accessibility). You sweat the details: spacing, typography, motion, micro-interactions.
Performance + quality minded: Comfortable with profiling, code-splitting, asset strategy, caching/CDN, and keeping bundles lean.
High-agency: You don’t wait for perfect specs - you define the problem, propose the solution, and ship.
Startup builder: You thrive in ambiguity, move fast, and raise the bar as you go. Ex-founders VERY much welcome.
Nice to have
- Familiarity designing for immersive or game-adjacent products.
Pay and Benefits
Salary ranges may be inclusive of several career levels and will be narrowed during the interview process based on a number of factors, including the candidate’s experience, qualifications, and location. Additional benefits for this role include: equity; and medical, dental, and vision benefits; and 401k retirement plan with matching.