Design Engineer

Design Engineer at Bolto

Seattle or San Francisco · On-site · Full-time
$125,000–$175,000 + equity

Design, build, and ship.

Bolto brings AI-native recruiting, payroll, and HR together so companies can hire, pay, and support their teams around the world.

We’re building the next generation of workforce software (AI-native Workday) and design is central to how it works. HR has historically had a UI/UX problem. You will help us solve that!

We’re hiring a Design Engineer to own experiences from the first sketch through production. You’ll work with mostly product, but also marketing, to deliver strong visual judgment on features along with polished interfaces.

Payroll and HR involve complex workflows and consequential decisions. Your job is to make them clear: help someone understand what needs attention, complete a task confidently, and know what happens next.

You’ll also shape how people first encounter Bolto through landing pages, interactive demos, and brand experiences. You’ll influence both what we build and how we build it.

What you’ll own

Product design and implementation
Design and build interfaces for recruiting, payroll, and HR workflows. Think through the complete experience, including navigation, information hierarchy, forms, tables, and loading, empty, error, and success states. Carry the details through to production.

Prototypes and interaction design
Turn ideas into working prototypes to test flows and explore alternatives. Use design tools, code, and AI where they help you move faster. Refine the interactions, responsiveness, and visual details that make a product feel finished.

Our design system
Build reusable components, design tokens, and documentation that keep the product consistent as it grows. Work with engineering to improve frontend foundations and make high-quality interfaces easier to ship.

Website and go-to-market design
Create landing pages and interactive experiences that explain Bolto clearly and help turn interest into customer conversations. Extend the brand into social content, event materials, and merchandise as needed.

Your first 90 days

First 30 days: Learn the product and ship a feature.
Get familiar with our customers, core workflows, and frontend codebase. Review the product alongside the team, identify a high-impact usability issue, and take a scoped improvement from design into production.

By day 60: Own the Bolto experience.
Lead product flows or substantial interface improvements from problem definition through implementation. Test assumptions with users or customer-facing teammates, handle the important edge cases, and contribute reusable components to the design system.

By day 90: Establish a repeatable way to ship great work.
Independently own design and implementation for a meaningful area of the product. Help prioritize the next set of improvements, strengthen our shared components, and show how your work improves clarity, usability, or conversion.

We’ll choose specific projects together based on customer needs and the product roadmap.

What you bring

• 2+ years of experience spanning product design and frontend development, with work you can walk us through from initial problem to shipped result.
• Strong visual and interaction design skills, including typography, layout, hierarchy, and responsive behavior.
• Fluency in Figma and hands-on experience building interfaces with HTML, CSS, and React.
• The ability to contribute production frontend code and collaborate with engineers on implementation.
• Good at UX! Experience making complex workflows understandable. Financial products, business software, and data-heavy interfaces are especially relevant.
• Attention to accessibility, edge cases, and the details that determine whether an interface works well outside a mockup.
• Resourcefulness and ownership: you can navigate an unfamiliar problem, explain your decisions, incorporate feedback, and see the work through.

Why Bolto

We’re backed by Standard Capital, General Catalyst, Y Combinator, and founders and executives from leading startups and Fortune 500 companies.

We’re building next-gen Workday. The future includes intuitive payments, HR, and workflows that are run by engineers and agents. The industry has been archaic for too long with terrible design. This is a massive opportunity to shape how people will get paid, receive benefits, and access support.

You’ll help define that experience while the team is small. Your work will shape both the product customers rely on and the first impression that brings them to Bolto.

Location, compensation, and benefits

This is a full-time role based in Seattle or San Francisco, with a split between days in office and remote as well.

We offer:

• $125,000–$175,000 salary, plus equity.
• Fully covered medical, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) matching from day one.
• Uncapped flexible paid time off.
• Commuter and gym benefits.
• Team offsite and regular outings.

Show us your work

Include a portfolio and, where possible, links to live products or interfaces you’ve built. Tell us what you personally designed and implemented, a meaningful tradeoff you made, and what changed after shipping.