Design Engineer

The posting, as SageOx wrote it

ABOUT THIS ROLE

You'll be the second designer at SageOx, partnering closely with our Founding Designer — not joining a design org, not reporting into one. Before you apply, read her post about what this actually feels like https://test.sageox.ai/blog/a-reminder-for-the-solo-designer. It's the most honest preview of this role that exists, including the uncomfortable parts.

We're not looking for another generalist. We want a T-shaped designer: exceptional at one thing — good enough to take part of our product somewhere none of us could have imagined — and strong enough to play across everything else. In the AI era, someone who is a rock star in one area can push out and have real influence in the others.

SageOx doesn't live on one screen. It lives in the product people use every day, on the conference room screen a whole team looks at together, and in hardware that sits on the table. You'll design and build across all of it, along with the agentic design harness that lets every AI coworker on the team build the way you would.

And you'll push us. We want someone who tells us we aren't thinking ambitiously enough about the experience — then ships the version that proves it.

WHAT YOU'LL DESIGN AND BUILD

These are shipping surfaces, not concepts on a roadmap, and most of them have no obvious precedent.

THE PRODUCT ITSELF

• Design features end to end, from your own user research to the shipped experience — web, desktop, mobile, CLI. Designers here write the production code. If you can't build it, the design doesn't ship.
• Memory you can walk up to. What a team has said, decided, and built. Designing retrieval people trust — where a claim came from, what an AI coworker actually read — is an information-design problem worthy of Tufte.
• Ambient coordination. Murmurs — small signals from your coworkers, human and AI, that reach you without becoming another notification you resent.
• How people grow into SageOx. We're breaking trail on human–AI collaboration, so the learning curve is part of the product: how people start, what nudges them next, and how they get more value over time.
• Talk to users, and use SageOx daily. Everyone here does. Design from lived use.

CONFERENCE ROOM SCREENS

• A room, cast to a screen. A live conversation on the TV everyone is already looking at, legible from across the room. Different rules than anything designed for arm's length.
• A living mural. A meeting draws itself as it happens, in front of everyone in the room. What should a thought look like thirty seconds after someone says it? Nobody knows yet.
• The room as a surface. What a meeting room becomes when a team's memory and its AI coworkers are present in it, and how everyone in it can see and steer what's happening.

HARDWARE

• A device with almost no screen. The Ox Dot sits on the table and gives the hivemind a body in the room. Its whole vocabulary is presence, light, and sound. Every instinct you've built for a rectangle is the

[…]
o whiteboard interviews, no take-home redesign of somebody's app. We start with your portfolio. Clear an initial assessment and we'll invite you to a work trial: 3–5 days, full-time, in person in Seattle, building something real alongside the team, the way the team actually works. It's paid, and the terms are agreed with you up front. Most of what either side needs to know about fit shows up in those few days, and it goes both ways — you learn as much about us as we do about you.

Before applying, please learn more about our work trials https://test.sageox.ai/careers/work-trial.

Ajit, our CEO, wrote up why we replaced interviews with this, including the uncomfortable math behind it: Read the post https://test.sageox.ai/blog/rip-tech-interviews →

SAGEOX TODAY

$15M seed led by Canaan, with A.Capital http://A.Capital, Pioneer Square Labs, and Founders' Co-op. Founded by Ajit Banerjee (AWS EC2/EBS, XetHub → Hugging Face), Ryan Snodgrass (early Amazon, Kindle/AWS-scale cloud systems), and Milkana Brace (EVP Product at Remitly) — people who've built this kind of infrastructure, and scaled through an acquisition or two, before. We're small on purpose, hiring our first ten. More about the team https://test.sageox.ai/about →

COMPENSATION

Competitive salary and meaningful equity. We'll talk specifics once we know it's a real mutual fit. That's what the trial is for.

APPLY

There's no shortage of comfortable places to design software right now. This is not one of them, and that's the point.

Include your portfolio, and lead with your spike. Show us the one area where you're exceptional, then the things you built yourself — an app, a tool, a device, a live site, a skill or MCP server — next to the design work behind them. For each, tell us what you made, how you built it, and what happened after. A repo or a live link beats a polished case study.

We're not working with recruiters or recruiting agencies/consultants at this time — direct applications only, please.