Founding Design Engineer

About

• We're building the future of storytelling and video editing.

• We're a small team that moves fast and builds things we're proud of.

• We care obsessively about taste: in design, in product, in every detail.

• We're solving these hard problems.

• We're backed by a Tier-1 global fund, YC, and founders of billion dollar companies.

Design Engineering

Cardboard is a video editor you can talk to. In a product like ours, how things move and respond isn't a finishing touch. It's the product.

We're hiring a Founding Design Engineer to own how Cardboard feels and how people see it: in the product, and on the pages and launches where they first meet us. You design in code and ship it yourself.

What you'll own

• The feel of the editor: timeline, preview, and the chat with our agent.

• Motion, shaders, and the visual effects people put in their videos.

• How people perceive Cardboard: marketing pages, launch moments, and experiments.

• Interface guidelines for the team and the UI our agents write.

Who you are

• You've shipped interfaces and launches people talk about.

• You know easing and timing deeply, and you have opinions about 80ms vs 300ms.

• You're solid in React, CSS, and WebGL, and you can profile a dropped frame.

• Bonus: creative tools, or WebGPU.

How we work

• You own outcomes, not tickets: decide what to build, ship it, and check it worked.

• You talk to users and look at the data.

• You build with AI agents every day, and you're the taste and judgment in the loop.

What success looks like

Within your first six months:

• The editor feels noticeably faster and calmer.

• Our marketing pages and launches set the bar for how Cardboard looks.

• The UI our agents write follows guidelines you set.

What you get

You'd be surrounded by people who are absurdly good at what they do. One started coding at 11 and shipped an app with 6M+ downloads in high school. One got into CS engineering at 14 and has been working on distributed systems for 8+ years. One's an ex-founder who took a company to 1.2M users and $300M+ in transactions. That's the team. We're looking for someone who'll raise the bar on technical craftsmanship and creative product quality. Apart from that you'd get:

• Competitive salary and founding-team equity.

• Unlimited tokens across every AI model. Use whatever you want, as much as you want.

• A healthy budget for AI tools and any peripherals you need to do your best work.

The Founding Design Engineer shapes how Cardboard’s conversational video editor looks, moves, and responds, while also building the product’s public-facing pages and launches. This hands-on role combines interface design and implementation, motion craft, and product judgment, with ownership of outcomes from deciding what to build through evaluating results.

Role at a glance

Skills mentioned

What you will likely work on

• Shape the timeline, preview, and agent chat experience in the video editor.
• Improve motion, responsiveness, and visual effects across the product.
• Build marketing pages, launch experiences, and experiments.
• Create interface guidelines for the team and AI-generated UI.
• Choose and deliver work end to end, then assess its impact.
• Talk with users and use product data to inform decisions.

Good fit signals

• Has shipped interfaces and launches that attracted attention.
• Has strong practical command of motion easing and timing.
• Can build with React, CSS, and WebGL and investigate dropped frames.
• Enjoys combining design judgment with hands-on implementation.
• Experience with creative tools or WebGPU is a bonus, not a requirement.