Design Engineer

Job description

ABOUT SUNSET At its core, Sunset was founded to help founders. We started by supporting startups through shutting down, but we have since expanded into unlocking a new revenue stream for all types of businesses. In 2025, we had a unique insight: the data every company generates each day through collaboration, communication, and building is some of the most valuable training data in the world. Public and synthetic data can only get frontier models so far, so the next generation of model progress depends on real, proprietary data grounded in how actual businesses operate. We are a primary source of it, partnering directly with the frontier AI labs building what comes next. WHY JOIN SUNSET NOW - We have scaled from $0 to a multi-eight-figure run rate in a matter of months - We have raised from top-tier investors, including Floodgate, Afore, Ludlow, and Hustle Fund - We are small enough that you will carry outsized responsibility and grow as quickly as the company does - You will partner with and build for some of the fastest and most important companies in the world - You will help build a massive, category-defining business from the ground floor THE ROLE Sunset asks people to complete work that is both unfamiliar and consequential. A customer may need to export years of internal company data from a dozen SaaS tools, understand whether a long-running transfer actually worked, or navigate the legal and operational steps of shutting down a company. The underlying systems are complex, but the product cannot make that complexity the user's problem. You will discover, design, and personally ship the interfaces that make this work understandable and trustworthy. You will prototype at the lowest-cost fidelity that answers the current question, then move into code early when real state, motion, responsiveness, accessibility, browser behavior, or technical constraints matter. Code is a design material here, not merely the final implementation step. This is a true design-engineering role. It is not a product-design position that hands implementation to another team, and it is not a frontend role that receives finished designs. You will own the interaction from the first ambiguous problem through a polished production result. Your first focus will be provider onboarding and connection status in Data Portal. You will improve the path from setup instructions and permissions through long-running progress, verification, failure, recovery, and team intervention. This gives the first quarter a real product boundary while you learn the wider enterprise-data and dissolution terrain. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Study how customers and our team acquire enterprise work data, recover from failed connections, and move through dissolution - Turn branching, long-running, and exception-heavy workflows into clear information architecture, interaction models, and production interfaces - Explore new flows at the fidelity the question requires, moving quickly from sketches or Figma into coded interactions with realistic state - Build production-quality interfaces in TypeScript and React, including responsive behavior, accessibility, tests, instrumentation, and failure states - Continuously improve visual hierarchy, layout, copy, motion, affordances, and flow across existing product surfaces, not only newly assigned features - Design the moments that create trust: progress, provenance, permissions, uncertainty, errors, recovery, human handoff, and consequential confirmation - Work directly with customers, domain experts, Product, and Engineering to test assumptions before polishing the wrong solution - Create reusable components and interaction patterns that make new providers and workflows coherent by default - Use AI deeply in research, prototyping, implementation, testing, and product experiences while verifying its output and designing clear human control WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE - A consequential customer or team workflow becomes materially easier to complete, understand, or recover from within the first 90 days - Customers and our team feel a steady improvement in the visual quality, coherence, and usability of the live product rather than waiting for a large redesign - Research and product evidence change the design before implementation effort is wasted - Production interfaces account for real state, exceptions, permissions, and failure rather than presenting a polished happy path - Customers and our team need less explanation, manual intervention, and repeated support to complete important work - Reusable interaction patterns and production components improve consistency and shorten later delivery - The quality of the final experience survives the transition from prototype to production because you own both YOU MIGHT THRIVE HERE IF - You have at least three years of professional experience designing and building digital products - You are equally credible in interaction design and production frontend code, including TypeScript, React, and CSS - You use code as a design material and can explore several interaction directions quickly without treating every prototype as production software - You have taken ambiguous product problems from research and framing through implementation, measurement, and iteration - You can make complex state understandable without hiding exceptions, uncertainty, permissions, or recovery - You have strong visual and interaction craft and care about accessibility, responsive behavior, motion, and the details of real use - You can build reusable systems without turning every product decision into a design-system project - You have startup experience and enjoy broad ownership, changing context, and building without a complete specification - You use modern AI tools fluently, verify their output, and have a point of view about when AI improves or weakens a product experience THIS ROLE MAY NOT BE FOR YOU IF - You want design and implementation to be separate jobs - You prefer polished greenfield concepts over workflows with difficult state, operational constraints, and exceptions - You want to optimize only the interface rather than the end-to-end customer and team experience - You need a complete product specification before you can begin - You do not want AI tools to be part of your daily design and engineering workflow BONUS - Experience with enterprise software, data connections, onboarding, integrations, files, documents, or long-running workflows - Experience designing legal, financial, compliance-sensitive, or otherwise high-trust products - Experience with Storybook, design tokens, component libraries, visual regression testing, or frontend quality systems - Deep experience with typography, layout, responsive systems, motion, animation, browser behavior, or advanced interaction design - Experience designing AI-assisted workflows with transparency, evaluation, human handoff, and recovery - Experience using synthetic states, seeded failures, or simulation to test interaction quality beyond the happy path