Product Design Engineer

Outset invented a better way to do research: AI-powered user interviews.

Global brands like Hubspot, Microsoft, Uber and Nestle use Outset to achieve deeper, qualitative insights about their users at unprecedented speed and scale.

The research industry is massive (>$140B and growing) and ripe for disruption. Incumbents are outdated, slow, and burdened by high-cost services. That's our opportunity.

Outset is backed by top Silicon Valley investors and raised a $30M Series B in December 2025—less than six months after our Series A—led by Radical Ventures with participation from M12 (Microsoft’s venture arm), 8VC, Y Combinator, and Adverb Ventures.

The raise follows a breakout year, with our business growing 8x as enterprise customers across industries adopt our category, AI‑moderated research, as the new standard for understanding people.

We’re a tight-knit team serving some of the world’s largest enterprises.

We're looking for a product designer with exceptional craft who is comfortable designing on canvas and in code. We are calling this a Design Engineer, but we recommend not getting caught up in the title.

So much has changed about what it means to do "design work". The toolkit has expanded to include tools like Codex and Claude Design, and now, our team is spending just as much time generating and molding prototypes as organizing canvases in Figma. And yet, strong opinion and interest in craft are still timeless skills that are essential to this role.

You'll join a small design team of two and own projects from the kernel of an idea to a feature customers use every day. You'll work directly with our Head of Design and founders on generative product experiences that are functional and beautiful.

Responsibilities

• Hold a high bar for craft. Produce wireframes, interaction designs and high-fidelity visuals, and sweat the details in the shipped product.

• Know what not to build. Question features that add complexity without adding much value, and help the team cut scope down to what matters most. Often, less is more.

• Prototype in code. Build functional, front-to-back prototypes with real data when that's the quickest way to settle a question or prove a concept.

• Ship to production. Take features from concept to merged PR. Write frontend code and work with engineers on the parts that need them.

Qualifications

We don't have many explicit requirements, and exceptional candidates might bend these rules.

• 3+ years of product design industry experience.

• Exceptional communication skills.

• Strong but loosely held opinions on design and product.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building enterprise software.

• Experience building in the research industry.

We're a small team that enjoys designing together in person. Near our desks in the San Francisco office there's a budding design library with books we pass around and find inspiration from.

Walking meetings are our default whenever we can manage them, and some of our best ideas have come from loops through the city's parks and along the Embarcadero waterfront.

At least once a week, the design team huddles with Outset’s PMs and founders to critique design work and brainstorm together.