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Asteroid (YC W25)

Founding Design Engineer

Asteroid (YC W25), San Francisco

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This range is provided by Asteroid (YC W25). Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

Base pay range

$110,000.00/yr - $160,000.00/yr

Asteroid is building mission control for AI agents, enabling any company to easily onboard AI browser workers. We’re starting by building browser agents that automate complex browser tasks like form filling and data retrieval, with a focus on reliability and security.
We're looking for an exceptional Founding Design Engineer to build the foundational technology of the next century: the ultimate human-agent interface.
Your mission as our Founding Design Engineer is to create the best interface for training, managing, and collaborating with AI agents. Creating an intuitive, high-performance frontend that empowers humans to effortlessly supervise agents, is critical. It’s the key step that unlocks browser agents for mission-critical applications, as humans rely on visual validation to confidently deploy AI in production.
We need an engineer with a proven record building stunning, performant user interfaces—ideally with video-rich experiences. You're frontend-focused but comfortably full-stack, with the backend and AI context needed to quickly iterate and support customer deployments beyond just frontend tasks.
If you're driven by building beautiful, impactful products at the intersection of humans and AI, this is your role.
This job is perfect for you if

  • You have exceptional taste and a passion for creating beautiful, polished user experiences
  • You want to define how millions of people will interact with AI agents, shaping the future of AI-human collaboration
  • You care deeply about making every customer interaction an absolute delight
  • You have built frontend applications loved and used daily by many users
  • You are excited to use the product you're building—and won't sleep peacefully until you've squashed that annoying frontend bug
  • You can ruthlessly prioritize between building the perfect feature and shipping quickly to deliver immediate value
  • You can independently translate customer conversations into actionable product improvements—without customers having to spell out every detail
  • It's a strong plus if you've previously built highly performant frontends that smoothly handle video recording and playback
Qualifications
  • Experience with a mature React codebase
  • Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Design or a closely related technical field
  • (Preferred) Previous experience building or contributing significantly to a design system or component library
  • (Preferred) Experience building smooth, responsive interfaces optimized specifically for efficient streaming, buffering, and interaction with video content is a strong plus
  • (Preferred) Experience managing websockets
Tech Stack
  • Frontend: React, TypeScript, Vite
  • Core Technologies: Go, TypesScript, Python, Playwright
  • Infrastructure: GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform
  • AI Tools: OpenAI, Anthropic, Computer Use
What You'll Build
  • Lead the design and implementation of the platform’s entire frontend, including the agent workflow builder, interactive browser-agent controls, session recording viewer, workflow management, human feedback optimization, and collaboration features
  • Own frontend development, crafting elegant user interfaces with modern frameworks (e.g., React, Vite)
  • Establish and maintain a robust design system, reusable component libraries, and UI standards
  • Create intuitive, highly efficient interfaces that enable humans to seamlessly control browser agents and effortlessly provide feedback
  • Rapidly prototype, iterate, and refine features in direct response to customer feedback
  • Build an advanced session-recording viewer for browser agents, intelligently highlighting critical moments in user workflows
  • Build customer workflows to reveal where the platform falls short so you can improve it
About Asteroid
We’re David & Joe, both AI engineers.
David has built everything from robots, algorithms for a space agency to AI agents. He studied at top universities in the Czech Republic, Singapore, Israel and UK, crowdfunding his tuition fees. David loves nature, tennis, his family dog (Ferdinand Albrecht II), and Czech pilsner.
Joe has been researching and building LLM-based systems since GPT-2. He designed and built Netcraft’s Scam Intelligence system, an LLM-powered “victim” which engages with scammers to extract their bank details. His agent runs in the wild at scale and disrupts hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud annually. Joe is an avid mountaineer and adventurer.
We both feel privileged to be alive at this pivotal moment in history as we observe the invention of non-human general intelligence. We’re excited to help integrate these generally intelligent systems into the global economy.
Not because it will be easy, but because it will be hard.
Join us.

Seniority level

  • Seniority level

    Mid-Senior level

Employment type

  • Employment type

    Full-time

Job function

  • Job function

    Engineering and Information Technology
  • Industries

    Software Development

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