Founding Design Engineer (New York City Metropolitan Area)

Founding Design Engineer

52 Limited is partnering with an innovative, venture-backed hospitality technology startup to find a Founding Design Engineer to join its growing team in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Our client is building an AI-native software platform that helps independent hotels, resorts, and boutique properties grow revenue, streamline operations, and deliver exceptional guest experiences. Backed by leading venture capital investors and founded by experienced entrepreneurs, the company is bringing modern technology and digital marketing capabilities to an underserved segment of the hospitality industry.

We're hiring a Design Engineer with exceptional visual taste and strong product judgment to join our founding team.

You'll shape both the software hotel operators use and the experiences their guests see. Your work will span Autumn's product UI, our own website, and reusable website and email templates that hotels use to attract and engage guests.

We want someone who can make a complex product workflow feel simple and create a beautiful, compelling website that makes someone want to book a stay. Strong interaction design, exceptional visual craft, and production-quality front-end code are equally important in this role.

This is a highly hands-on role. You'll work directly with founders, engineers, and hotel operators to understand problems, explore solutions, prototype quickly, and ship the result. You'll build what you design yourself, in production code.

The hotel-facing web work is about creating flexible templates and systems that serve many properties, rather than designing each hotel's website individually.

What You'll Do

• Own product experiences end to end. Take work from problem definition and user research through information architecture, interaction design, visual design, prototyping, front-end implementation, and iteration.
• Make complex workflows intuitive. Turn hospitality workflows across revenue, marketing, guest management, and operations into clear interfaces that busy hotel operators can use confidently.
• Design thoughtful AI-native experiences. Help users delegate work, review outputs, maintain control, and recover when systems fail.
• Design and build our website. Translate our positioning and product story into a distinctive, compelling experience, and ship it in code.
• Create reusable hotel website templates. Design and build layouts, components, and customization options that work beautifully across different properties, brands, imagery, and content.
• Create reusable email templates. Design and build responsive HTML email that helps hotels communicate with prospective and returning guests through clear, visually compelling marketing and guest communications.
• Build coherent design systems. Develop components, patterns, and visual foundations in design and in code across product UI, websites, and email, adapting them to each audience and medium.
• Work directly with customers and engineers. Understand real needs, make thoughtful tradeoffs, and ensure the shipped experience reflects the design intent.
• Learn from shipped work. Use customer feedback and performance data to improve usability, engagement, and conversion.

Our Ideal Candidate

• Has exceptional taste and cares deeply about typography, hierarchy, composition, imagery, interaction, and the details that make an experience feel considered.
• Is equally comfortable designing and building useful product interfaces and compelling consumer-facing websites.
• Can simplify complicated workflows without losing functionality that users need.
• Thinks beyond a polished screen or page to consider navigation, responsive behavior, loading, empty states, errors, and accessibility.
• Understands how visual storytelling, trust, and clear calls to action help people make decisions.
• Designs systems that hold up across different brands, content, and real-world use.
• Moves quickly from an ambiguous problem to a testable idea, then refines the details in code.
• Is curious about customers, receptive to feedback, and able to explain the reasoning behind design decisions.
• Uses AI tools thoughtfully to accelerate exploration, prototyping, and execution while maintaining a high quality bar.

Requirements

We don't require formal credentials. We do require:

• Excellent product design fundamentals. Strong information architecture, interaction design, visual design, prototyping, and systems thinking.
• Exceptional visual craft. A portfolio that demonstrates a distinctive eye and consistently strong execution.
• Evidence of both product and web design. Show us a shipped product experience and a compelling website or consumer-facing experience. Be clear about what you personally owned.
• Strong front-end engineering. You write production-quality HTML, CSS, React, and TypeScript, and can show responsive product UI and websites you designed and built yourself.
• End-to-end ownership. You can understand a customer or business problem, develop a point of view, explore solutions, ship, and learn from the result.
• Technical collaboration. You work effectively with engineers, can read APIs and data models, and understand how the front end connects to the rest of the system.
• Clear communication. You can explain design decisions to technical and non-technical teammates and respond well to direct feedback.

Nice to Have

• Experience in consumer products, hospitality, travel, ecommerce, marketplaces, or other areas where brand, trust, and conversion matter.
• Experience designing B2B products, workflow tools, or operational software.
• Experience building configurable website templates, themes, or multi-brand design systems.
• Experience designing and implementing responsive HTML email.
• Experience with Next.js and Tailwind CSS, which we use across our product and website.
• Experience designing AI-native products or agentic workflows.
• Startup experience with significant ownership and limited process.

We welcome candidates from B2C, B2B, agency, and independent backgrounds. We care more about the quality of your work and your ability to solve problems across product and web than the category you've worked in.

Traits that will Thrive

• High agency and self-direction: Acts without waiting for detailed requirements or instructions.
• Small-team intensity: Comfortable working closely with a small, high-output team.
• Pragmatic problem solving: Challenges assumptions and finds simpler paths forward.
• Quality-driven execution: Maintains high standards for usability, visual craft, and the shipped experience.
• Low ego and accountability: Takes ownership of outcomes and cares more about reaching the right answer than defending the first idea.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary and equity.
• Beautiful office in Williamsburg, New York.
• Stipend for lunch and fitness, and top-tier medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• A front-row seat to building an AI-native vertical SaaS company.
• The opportunity to shape both our product and the digital experiences independent hotels offer their guests.

Location & Requirements This is a full-time, onsite opportunity based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with an expectation of working in the office 4–5 days per week. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States.

About 52 Limited 52 Limited is a creative and technology staffing agency connecting exceptional talent with innovative companies nationwide. We specialize in opportunities across design, technology, marketing, and creative disciplines.