Manager Design Engineering

About Fiveonefour We love data and analytics. And we love building software. But in our experience, to do anything truly interesting at scale with data/analytics, you have to leave the warm cozy world of software development, and enter the specialized workflows, tools, and technologies of the data engineering ecosystem. We’re on a mission to democratize data and bring incredible software developer experiences to the data & analytics stack. In the future we’re building, ANY software developer (human or agentic) can build world class data-driven experiences - quickly and intuitively, as a native part of their core software development experience. We’re experienced founders with a track record of success in developer tooling and enterprise software. We have a remote-first team of 15, backed by incredible investors, and we’re building a high-performance culture that's demanding but flexible. We’re still small, but growing quickly, and joining at this time gives you a tremendous opportunity to help shape the culture and long term future of the company. We serve a highly technical developer user, and we believe great developer experience is grounded in both great design and great engineering. This role is an interesting one that will span both disciplines: design and engineering. You’re either a designer who loves to code, or you’re a frontend engineer who loves to design. As our first Technical Designer / Design Engineer / UX Engineer (we can figure out the right title for you), you’ll start by reporting to the Co-founder/CPO (that's me ), although we may find this role works best embedded with core engineering and reporting to my co-founder, our CTO. You will help build a future that serves both human and agentic developers and meets them where they are. You have a strong sense of UX/UI design principles and user-driven design processes. You have great taste and care deeply about aesthetics. You also have solid frontend development skills, a deep empathy for developers, and hard-earned opinions about what great DX actually feels like. I expect your primary focus will be product UX, especially the GUI, but you will also work on programmatic interfaces (APIs, CLI, etc), as well as upstream touchpoints in brand, marketing, and onboarding interfaces. You’ll work on both our open source framework MooseStack, and our commercial hosting platform. You’ll be a core part of the product team, collaborating closely with product management, product marketing, and core engineering. You’ll of course engage directly with our growing community of developers, users, and early champions. I’m committed to helping you achieve your career goals - ideally within Fiveonefour - but even beyond, if that’s where your best path leads. This means I will invest in you, understanding your strengths and weaknesses, and coaching you through new skills and development. We’re all passionate about our work, and while we put in the long hours needed to be competitive as a high growth startup, we also emphasize flexibility - for example, many of us are parents and get creative to make startup-life work with parent-life. Responsibilities: Drive the best possible developer experiences for our users across all interactions with our products and company Help shape product strategy and direction, and represent the best interests of the developer user at all times Learn directly from our users through high velocity product and design discovery and validation Leverage AI as a core accelerator to your workflow and leverage generator on your differentiated human skills Drive the overall taste of the product and company on both aesthetics and interaction design with an opinionated sense of style Capture flows and rapidly build and iterate through low to high fidelity designs Iterate in code, skipping classic design tools entirely where it can accelerate outcomes Build working prototypes and MVPs that internal and external users can get hands on with Collaborate closely with peers in product and engineering, shepherding UI/UX/DX decisions from idea to shipped product to user engagement with high velocity and quality Work with a constant curiosity for our users, empathy for their pains and opportunities, and passion for the problems we can solve and change we can bring to the world of data and development Qualifications: 7 years as a technical-leaning designer and/or design-leaning developer Portfolio of beautiful, intuitive, innovative features/products you’ve shipped Strong visual design aesthetic and UI/UX design skills - you can create, review and self approve a design Strong software prototyping skills - you’ve developed end-to-end, scalable, accessible products/features, with or without vibe coding support Comfort and competency with our design and dev tools/tech, with deep expertise in either the dev or design tooling (or both!) Design: Figma, especially design systems and components to enable rapid, high quality iteration Dev tools: Git, IDEs, Claude code and other AI copilots Languages/frameworks: Typescript, Tailwind, React, ShadCN Experience running user-facing discovery and validation Very nice-to-have: experience designing/building developer tools If you're looking for a challenging role and are excited to build a company from the ground up, please apply!