Design Engineer Palo Alto

Member of Technical Staff, Design Engineering

Design and build the design system and the interface craft behind products used by enterprises and written by agents.

Travel: Occasional travel to customer sites

About Sycamore

Sycamore is building the trusted agent operating system for the enterprise. Our platform helps companies build, deploy, and orchestrate agentic apps that take on real operational work, with the security and control large organizations need.

We are a small, engineering-led team working directly with Fortune 500 enterprises. We have raised $65M from Coatue and Lightspeed, along with other investors and industry leaders.

Working in Design Engineering

Design Engineering owns the design system and the quality of the interface itself: the component libraries, the token system, motion, layout, and accessibility.

The split between design and engineering is genuinely even. Half the work is engineering, in a strict TypeScript codebase where the components you write ship and get consumed. The other half is design in Figma, deciding what a surface looks like and how it behaves before any of it exists in code. We are not looking for an engineer who follows a spec, or a designer who hands one off.

It reaches past product UI, to the marketing site, launch material, and the brand underneath them, and past the screen entirely. Agents talk, and voice has almost none of the affordances a screen gives you: turn-taking and barge-in to get right, latency you cannot hide, and error recovery that has to work when the person cannot see what went wrong.

The engineering side is unusual in one specific way. Our component library ships into applications that agents generate, and nobody reviews those line by line, so a component whose interface is ambiguous gets used incorrectly at scale and silently. The interface has to be legible without documentation, the public surface is contract-tested so a breaking change fails at compile time, and consumers theme through tokens rather than forking components.

What you will do

• Design product UI and UX in Figma, from the first exploration through the states, edge cases, and specifications that make it buildable.
• Build and own product surfaces across Sycamore Forge and Sycamore Guard, from the interface through the API behind it.
• Design interactions for asynchronous, streaming, long-running, and non-deterministic behavior, including partial output, interruption, and failure.
• Own the design system on both sides, keeping the Figma library and the shipped code describing the same thing.
• Design beyond the screen when it is needed, including voice interfaces for agents that speak, marketing and launch surfaces, and the brand they sit inside.
• Turn powerful platform primitives into interactions that enterprise users can understand and trust.

The environment you will work in

We design in Figma, with the design system maintained there alongside its compiled counterpart in code. Our current product environment includes React and TypeScript with TanStack Router and Query, Zustand for state, and Tailwind; Python cloud services on FastAPI with typed data models and PostgreSQL; server-sent events for streaming; durable workflows; and cloud-native deployment on Kubernetes.

TypeScript is strict, and our component libraries are contract-tested so that a breaking change to a public interface fails at compile time rather than in a generated application. We test with Vitest and Playwright, including component harnesses and screenshot coverage, and we use coding agents, traces, evaluations, and production feedback as part of everyday engineering.

This is context, not a checklist. We do not require previous experience with every framework or library in our stack. People who understand systems, can design as well as they build, and have shipped production software can become effective here without matching our tools one for one.

What we are looking for

• 5-12 years of combined design and engineering experience. We will make exceptions for exceptional people in either direction.
• A portfolio of interfaces you designed rather than only implemented, shipped to people who actually used them, and fluency in Figma as a working tool.
• Deep React and TypeScript at the type level, and experience composing unstyled primitives rather than adopting a prebuilt component kit.
• Range beyond product UI. Enough craft in typography, layout, and brand to make a marketing page, and enough interest in other modalities to design a voice interaction rather than a transcript of a visual one.
• Product judgment. You can find the real problem behind a request and choose a useful first version.
• Accessibility as a default rather than a checklist item, and the ability to reason about it from first principles.
• A security-minded approach to enterprise data, permissions, and what an interface should refuse to show.
• Comfort with non-determinism. The systems you are building interfaces for do not behave identically twice.
• AI-native. You use coding agents and modern models as a force multiplier while still owning architecture, correctness, and operational outcomes.
• Comfort with startup ambiguity, fast feedback loops, and broad ownership.
• A 30-minute introductory conversation.
• A 60-minute portfolio conversation about work you designed and the decisions behind it.
• Two 60-minute technical interviews, one on systems design and one on coding.
• A take-home assignment where you design and build a real solution using the tools you would use on the job.
• Build the surface through which enterprises actually use agentic apps.
• Work on interface problems that are genuinely unsolved, because the systems underneath behave unlike anything interfaces were designed for.
• Design product slices before you build them, and own them end to end rather than a layer of them.
• Build components consumed by both people and language models, which is a stranger and more interesting problem than it sounds.
• Join early enough to shape the design system, the product architecture, and the India engineering team.
• Work as one engineering team across India and Palo Alto.
• Receive competitive cash compensation and meaningful equity in the company you are helping build.

Hard problems, real impact

Trust architectures, memory systems, multi-agent coordination. The foundational layer that makes agentic apps work in production.

Small team, high ownership

Every engineer shapes the product and the culture. No layers of process between you and the work that matters.

Backed by the best

$65M from Coatue, Lightspeed, Abstract Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, 8VC, and notable industry angels.

Grow with us

Competitive compensation, meaningful equity, and a genuine focus on your growth as the company scales.

Products · Bengaluru · full-time

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