Design Engineer

About the role

ABOUT HUD

HUD https://www.hud.ai/'s mission is to build reliable, fair and open infrastructure for AI data. We want data to be valuable for the people who create it and trustworthy for the labs that train on it. Our team is a quickly growing group of researchers, engineers and operators building the economy that shapes what AI will become. Backed by $16M from top VCs and YC (W25), our marketplace and platform are used by startups, Fortune 500 companies and frontier labs.

ABOUT THE ROLE

HUD has two products. On the HUD Platform, AI teams build environments, run agents on tasks, and review traces with our QA agent. DataVendor is a marketplace where vendors sell training data, mostly codebases, to frontier AI labs. Both are full of interlinked concepts, and the job is to make them clear enough that people can act.

You'll join our product and design engineering team, working with our design lead, and own features end to end. You'll find the problem in real usage, design the flow directly in code, connect it to our APIs, and ship it. Most near-term work is on DataVendor.

PROBLEMS YOU'LL WORK ON (AS AN EXAMPLE)

- Make a long agent trace readable in seconds: turn a stream of tool calls, screenshots and scores into a view where the failing step is obvious.

- Compare evaluation runs people actually trust: design the tables and diffs labs rely on when choosing which model to ship.

- Shorten the path from sign-up to first successful run: find drop-offs with PostHog replays and funnels, fix them, and measure the result.

- Make a two-sided data marketplace feel simple: make listing, estimation, offers and proposals clear for both vendors and buyers.

- Grow the design system as you ship: feed every new surface back into shared primitives and patterns so the next one ships faster.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Ship features to production in Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind v4, Motion, TanStack Query, Zustand, Clerk, Bun, and a Python/FastAPI backend. From interaction design to API integration, covering complex UX flows, empty, loading and error states.

- Design in code. Product UI is built and refined in the browser. Our codebase and design-system pages are the source of truth, and Figma is for exploration and brand work.

- Learn from real usage: watch PostHog session replays, ship behind feature flags, talk to users and our customer-facing team, then improve what you built.

- Work across the API boundary with backend engineers: shape the data a screen needs, and make small changes to our Python services when a feature calls for it, with review.

- Extend each product's design system (they are separate on purpose) and keep a high bar for motion, responsiveness, accessibility and copy.

YOU MAY BE A GOOD FIT IF YOU

- Have shipped and maintained a product that real people use, and can show what you changed after watching them use it.