Design Engineer at Altara in San Francisco, CA

We’re building the scientific intelligence platform for the physical world, to accelerate breakthroughs in semiconductors, batteries, advanced materials, aerospace, and beyond. These industries represent trillions in spend, but are still trapped in outdated software. We’re changing that by building the intelligence layer to help scientists and engineers move faster and solve core problems -- R&D through manufacturing.

We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a category-defining company at the intersection of AI and the physical sciences. And we’re building a world-class team to do it.

We recently raised a seed round led by Greylock, with participation from Neo, BoxGroup, Liquid 2, and top angels including Jeff Dean + leadership at OpenAI and AMD. Our team (ex-Applied Intuition, SpaceX, Warp, Jane Street, Microsoft) works in-person in San Francisco. Our office is located walking distance from 4th and King Caltrain station.

The Opportunity

We’re looking for a Design Engineer excited to deliver delightful and modern experiences for our customers: scientists and engineers used to cumbersome legacy software. You’ll own the end-to-end design of the product, shape our product experience and design culture, and work directly with the founders, engineering team, and early customers to set the bar for what this product becomes.

What you’ll do:

• Own the design and core UI/UX for our product.
• Ship features in Altara's frontend application.
• Translate customer pain points into product strategy and roadmap decisions.
• Break down ambiguous problems and requirements into clear, intuitive user flows.
• Bring strong opinions, sweat the details, and relentlessly push for simplicity.
• Develop and evolve our long-term product vision, design system, and brand guidelines as the team grows.
• Collaborate with the founders and engineering team to ship quickly without compromising craft.

We would love to meet you if you:

• Have exceptional visual taste, deep attention to detail, and a genuine love for the craft.
• Have experience designing and shipping 0-to-1 products.
• Already use AI tools daily and think critically about how to push their limits.
• Thrive in fast-paced, unstructured environments with evolving requirements.
• Love to learn, bias toward action, and enjoy taking full ownership of problems end-to-end.
• Care about solving meaningful scientific challenges and disrupting the industry, not just building another SaaS tool.

Bonus points if you have:

• Designed products related to LLMs, agentic workflows, search, or AI-driven systems.
• Worked at an early stage startup, founded a company, or plan to start one someday.
• Experience or deep curiosity in science.

Learn More about Altara

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