Design Engineer

HUD'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.

• Write production React and TypeScript, and can read, debug and review code yourself, including code your AI tools wrote.

• Have strong interaction and visual judgment for complex, data-heavy tools.

• Are comfortable enough across the stack to integrate REST APIs, reason about data models, and make modest backend changes.

• Use AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) every day.

• Explain your decisions clearly to engineers, product owners and founders on fast-paced live calls.

Strong candidates may also have: built developer tools, marketplaces or data-heavy products; worked with AI agents, evaluations or training data; built component libraries or design systems in code; worked at an early-stage startup.

How to apply and what to expect

Send a portfolio or links to shipped work; live products beat Figma screens. In the first call you'll walk through one thing you shipped: what you personally did, how you learned from users, and what happened after launch. Then a founder interview, then a paid three-day remote work trial in our codebase. The role is full-time with an immediate start.

Team & company details

• Team Size: ~25 people currently, mostly full-time in-person, but some remote.

• Our team: Our team brings together five International Olympiad medalists across IOI, ILO and IPhO, researchers published at NeurIPS and ICLR, and engineers and researchers from Google DeepMind, Amazon, AWS, Meta, Qwen, GLM, and Mercor. It also includes operators from BCG and Uber, the first security hire at one of the largest crypto exchanges, serial AI startup founders, former quant researchers, artists and the former #1 ranked Catan player in the world.

• Company stage: We have 8 figures in funding and are scaling profitably and quickly to meet very strong demand.

Logistics

• Employment: Full-time.

• Location: We have offices in San Francisco or Singapore but are open to remote candidates who can work hours that 70-80% overlap with either San Francisco or Singapore time zones.

• Visa Sponsorship: We provide support for relocation and visas for strong full-time candidates to the US or Singapore.

• Timeline: Applications are rolling. The process is 2 technical interviews and a 2-3 day work trial.

What we offer

• Competitive compensation

• 100% covered top-of-the-line medical, dental, and vision (US and Singapore employees)

• Lunch and dinner for in-office employees

• Company-wide holiday break (Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day) on top of PTO and paid holidays

• 401k with a 4% match

• Other perks including an Equinox membership and commuter benefits (US employees) and a health/wellness stipend (Singapore employees)

• Unlimited* access to tokens for ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cursor, etc. By unlimited, we mean no one on our token usage leaderboard has ever hit a limit. So we have no idea what the limit is.

• Two top-floor offices in San Francisco’s Union Square and Singapore’s Raffles Place

• Annual travel budget to visit either office

Compensation

Actual offers are adjusted for experience and location, but our base salary bands are

• San Francisco (and other major US cities): $130,000 - $225,000

• Singapore: $100,000 - $170,000

• Rest of world: $100,000 - $170,000

Due to high volume, we may not actively respond to every application, but feel free to contact us at recruiting@hud.so or elsewhere if we missed your application!