Senior Design Engineer

Senior Design EngineerChicagoWhy AssemblyAIAssemblyAI builds the best-in-class Voice AI models powering the next generation of voice applications. Our models serve 600M+ inference calls monthly, process 1M+ hours of audio daily, and power 2 billion+ end-user experiences. The Voice AI space is at an inflection point; we're looking for folks truly excited to join a small team and help define the future of the industry.We are one of the most capital-efficient AI companies on the planet - with under 100 people generating roughly $500K ARR per employee, we sit among the top 5 most revenue-dense teams within the fastest-growing AI companies today. That's not an accident; it's a deliberate choice to stay lean, move fast, and give every person on the team outsized ownership and impact. With thousands of customers including Granola, Fireflies, Figure AI, and CallRail, the company has real scale - processing over 2 million hours of audio daily and handling more than 1 million API calls every day. This is a rare growth-stage opportunity where the business is proven and the trajectory is steep, but the team is still small enough that your fingerprints are on everything.If you've ever felt buried under layers of bureaucracy, starved of real ownership, or frustrated watching your work disappear into a slow-moving org, AssemblyAI is built differently. The company operates as a true meritocracy, with no heavy planning or approval processes and no gatekeeping on the tools or information you need. For anyone who genuinely cares about voice AI, not as a trend to chase, but as a technology to build, this is the place where the most interesting problems at the most interesting scale are being solved by a team small enough that you'll actually know everyone's name.We're committed to creating a space where our employees can bring their full selves to work and have equal opportunity to succeed. No matter your race, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, origin, ability, age, veteran status, if joining this mission speaks to you, we encourage you to apply!About the RoleWe're looking for a Senior Design Engineer to own the craft and feel of AssemblyAI's product experience end to end. This person will design and build the interfaces our developers live in, from the Playground to the dashboard, and hold the bar on how everything looks, moves, and feels, not just whether it works. This person should have a strong design background paired with real frontend engineering ability, and be deeply interested in what exceptional product design looks like in an AI-native, developer-facing product.You lead with design. Engineering is how you bring that design to life, because you don't have to hand your vision off to someone else to build it. You care about the details other people skip: interaction states, motion, hierarchy, information density, the difference between a UI that works and one that feels right.This is a cross-functional role that requires close partnership with engineering, marketing and sales, and the judgment to move from a rough idea to a polished, shipped experience without waiting for a spec.What You'll DoOwn the visual and interaction design of our core product surfaces, then build them in production React and TypeScriptSet the bar for UX quality across the product: interaction states, motion, hierarchy, and the details that separate a working interface from one that feels consideredTake rough product ideas and turn them into polished, high-fidelity experiences, prototyping quickly to pressure-test direction before we commitShape and steward our design system and visual language so quality scales as the product growsPartner directly with engineering and marketing on direction, not just executionUse AI tooling and agents as a core part of how you work, designing and shipping faster because of itWhat You'll NeedA strong portfolio of shipped product work that demonstrates real design taste and craftGenuine UX and visual design ability, from concept through high-fidelity executionDeep proficiency in Figma, comfortable moving from low-fidelity exploration to high-fidelity, dev-ready designs and maintaining shared component librariesSolid frontend engineering skills, comfortable building production interfaces in modern React and TypeScriptFluency with AI-assisted design and development, and a real instinct for building AI-native interfacesComfort operating with ambiguity and owning outcomes end to endNice To HaveMotion design chops, comfortable using animation and micro-interactions to make an interface feel alive and guide attention, not just decorate itIllustration or visual storytelling ability, able to create original graphics, diagrams, or brand-aligned artwork that elevates the product and marketing surfacesExperience designing for developer platforms or API-first products, and a feel for what makes technical tools intuitive to build onPay Transparency: AssemblyAI strives to recruit and retain exceptional talent from diverse backgrounds while ensuring pay equity for our team. Our salary ranges are based on paying competitively for our size, stage, and industry, and are one part of many compensation, benefit, and other reward opportunities we provide.There are many factors that go into salary determinations, including relevant experience, skill level, qualifications assessed during the interview process, and maintaining internal equity with peers on the team. The range shared below is a general expectation for the function as posted, but we are also open to considering candidates who may be more or less experienced than outlined in the job description. In this case, we will communicate any updates in the expected salary range.The provided range is the expected salary for candidates in the U.S. Outside of those regions, there may be a change in the range which will be communicated to candidates throughout the interview process.Salary range: $180,000 - $240,000