Design Engineer
External
Eagle · New York CityPrepare for this interview
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About the role
Our core thesis: 85% of what engineers do today is theoretically automatable, yet less than 5% has actually been touched by AI. That gap is the largest of any profession. Our plan is to close it by acquiring engineering firms, building purpose-built tools for their staff, and compounding that proprietary intelligence across acquisitions. As a Design Engineer , you'll work directly with the CTO to own how that intelligence becomes something engineers actually trust and use. The hard part isn't only modeling the data-it's making non-deterministic, agentic systems legible to people who have never worked with a software company before. You own the surface where that trust is won or lost. You get a front-row seat to building a company from zero-engaging with product strategy, firm acquisitions, and architecture decisions-on a problem domain that's barely been touched by AI.
Responsibilities
- Embed with staff at engineering firms alongside the founders; watch how they actually work, then come back and design and build against what you saw
- Own the product surface end-to-end-from interaction design and prototyping through shipping the production front-end yourself
- Establish and own our design system: the components, patterns, and primitives that have to stay coherent as we compound products across acquisitions
- Define the interaction patterns for an AI-native platform-streaming and latency, human-in-the-loop review, provenance and citations, and making agent behavior transparent enough to trust
- Collaborate directly with the CTO on product direction, culture, and what we'll build next
- What we look for
- Strong design taste and the engineering chops to ship it yourself in production (React/TypeScript or equivalent)-you don't hand off to someone else to build
- Has built and maintained a design system that more than one product or team depended on
- Has real reps designing UX for AI-native products and is comfortable with the problems that don't exist in traditional software: non-determinism, streaming output, uncertainty, agentic flows, and earning user trust in machine output
- Has a deep curiosity for how things work (an organization, a workflow, a market)
- Isn't afraid to expose their ignorance and is constantly asking why
- Has the poise and communication skills to earn trust with people who've never worked with a tech company before
- Can sit with noisy, conflicting feedback from users and distill it into a clear opinion about what to build
- Is willing to get on a plane with us
- Is not above any task: up to draw the icon set, write the component, sit beside a user and watch them click, or wire up an off-the-shelf tool to test an idea fast
Benefits
Additional Information
About Eagle We're on a mission to radically transform the way we design and construct our built environment. Backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Eagle acquires and transforms civil, structural, and MEP engineering firms with applied AI. We're an AI laboratory dedicated to providing engineers with the tools they need to solve the world's hardest infrastructure, energy, and climate problems. By arming designers with frontier technology, our ambition is to build the most valuable, talent-dense engineering firm in the United States.
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