Staff Design Engineer

ClosedLoop Staff Design Engineer Austin, TX · Full time Company website

Staff Design Engineer at ClosedLoop (Austin, on-site): own the look and feel of our agentic software development platform end to end, from prototype to polished product. It's a craft-first design role for someone who ships their own front-end code with AI tools as their partner, owns the design system, and helps define how people and AI agents build software together.

About ClosedLoop

We're ClosedLoop, a team of Closers in Austin building the platform where people and AI agents build software together. Our product covers the whole software lifecycle: people set the direction and make the calls that matter, while AI agents do the heavy lifting of planning, writing, and reviewing the code. We're our own first user, using the product every day to ship the product itself. We got here from healthcare AI, where we won a national CMS challenge, then went all-in on AI to make our own team faster, and the internal tool we built for that worked so well it became the company. We move fast, hold a high bar, and hand people real ownership from day one. If you want to shape how software gets built in the AI era, come build with us.

Description

ABOUT CLOSEDLOOP

ClosedLoop is building an agentic software development platform: a place where people and AI agents plan, build, review, and ship software together. We started in healthcare AI, where our enterprise analytics platform won a national CMS challenge and still runs profitably today. About a year ago we went all-in on using AI to make our own engineers dramatically faster, and the internal tool we built to do it worked so well that we turned it into our product.

We are a small, senior team in Austin. We use our own product every day, and we are backed by a profitable business, which gives us the runway to build something genuinely ambitious.

THE ROLE

As our Staff Design Engineer, you will own how the entire platform looks and feels, from the first rough prototype to the polished thing people use every day. This is a design role at its core. You care about craft: the spacing, the motion, the moment an interaction just clicks. And you are not satisfied handing off a mockup and hoping it survives implementation. Instead, you work directly in code, with AI development tools as your primary partner. You do not need to hand-write every line, but you need the taste to know what beautiful looks like and the fluency to direct AI agents until the shipping product matches the picture in your head. And because good design should outlast any one screen, you will also build and run the agents and tooling that carry that taste across everything we ship.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

• Design and build the core product. Own the look, feel, and flow of the platform’s key surfaces, then bring them to life in real front-end code, with AI tools handling the mechanical parts of implementation. The bar is not "it works," it is design that feels considered, coherent, and genuinely nice to use.
• Prototype in code, not just Figma. Build interactive, high-fidelity prototypes and reusable UI kits so a direction can be felt and used quickly instead of debated in the abstract.
• Treat the design system as a living product. Maintain the shared components, Storybook catalogs, and theming that keep product, design, and engineering speaking the same visual language.
• Scale your taste with AI agents. Create and run a fleet of agents that watch for drift (accessibility gaps, misaligned UI, the little rough edges) and help hold the whole product line to a high bar.
• Design how people and agents work together. Shape the information architecture and moment-to-moment interactions for how someone supervises an autonomous coding agent, follows its reasoning, and sees what it is doing, producing, and costing.
• Keep a critical eye on what ships. Walk the live desktop and web apps the way a discerning user would, notice what is not good enough yet, and partner with Product to turn those findings into prioritized work. No handoff wall: you stay close to Product and Engineering from first sketch to shipped feature.
• Extend and evolve the brand. Partner with Product, Marketing, and leadership to grow the brand from a foundation into a fully realized system.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

• 8+ years in product design or design engineering, shipping real software that people use.
• Serious design chops: strong instincts for information architecture, flows, and high-fidelity visual and interaction design. This is the heart of the role.
• You direct the code (with AI as your partner) rather than stopping at a mockup, and you are comfortable in the codebase with modern component-based frameworks (React or similar).
• You use AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, or similar) as a daily driver, and you are genuinely excited to build and operate agents, not just prompt them.
• You think in systems and treat the design system as a product, not an afterthought.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and a fast, AI-native environment, with good judgment about when to ship, when to consult, and when to change course.
• A strong communicator in writing, verbally, and visually. No ego: you give and take feedback gracefully, whether it comes from a teammate or an AI critic.

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience designing developer tools, agentic or AI products, or dense, data-heavy B2B software.

WHY YOU WILL LOVE IT HERE

• We are our own first user. You will design a tool the