Founding Design Engineer

About

• We're building the future of storytelling and video editing.
• We're a small team that moves fast and builds things we're proud of.
• We care obsessively about taste: in design, in product, in every detail.
• We're solving these hard problems.
• We're backed by a Tier-1 global fund, YC, and founders of billion dollar companies.

Cardboard is the agentic video editor. It actually watches your footage, so it can search across tens of gigs, pull the right clips, sync to the beat, and source everything else (music, graphics, sfx, etc.) it needs. The final cut comes out in your brand's language, and all of this happens inside the browser.

You'd be surrounded by people who are absurdly good at what they do. One started coding at 11 and shipped 6M+ downloads. One got into CS engineering at 14 and has been working on distributed systems for 8+ years. One's an ex-founder who took a company to 1.2M users and $300M+ in transactions. That's the team. We're looking for someone who'll raise the bar on the creative side the way we have on the technical and business side.

Design Engineering

Video is the most powerful way humans tell stories. It always has been. But creating it today is still painfully hard. Fragmented tools, steep learning curves, and workflows that get in the way of the actual creative work. We're building Cardboard to change that.

In a product like ours, how things move, respond, and feel is not a finishing touch. It's the product. We're hiring a Founding Design Engineer who lives at that intersection: someone who can author the feel of Cardboard, not just implement it.

You'll be working alongside a team of engineers who all care deeply about craft, including the founders. You know enough full stack to hook things up when you need to, but interactions, animations, and the details that make a product feel alive are what you're here for.

What you'll actually do

• Build and ship the interactions, animations, micro-interactions, and core rendering engine work that powers Cardboard.
• Optimize memory usage when projects reference tens of gigs of source media through smart streaming, caching, and asset management across OPFS, Cache Storage, cache headers, and related browser primitives.
• Work across core product features like the editor timeline, end-to-end microsites, micro-apps, and polished elements across our marketing and blog.
• Build reusable components and push the quality bar for everything that touches the surface, while respecting the user's device constraints.
• Experiment with new interaction patterns, shaders, and creative techniques. Ship the ones that make the product feel more alive.
• Write great design.md files. Set interface guidelines for the team and our agents in the spirit of interfaces.rauno.me. Raise our accessibility standards.
• Wire up API endpoints when the work demands it.
• Solve these hard problems.

Who you are

• You have deep knowledge of easing and timing. Ease-out, ease-in-out, linear: you know when and why. You have opinions about 80ms vs 300ms.
• You're fluent in GSAP, Framer Motion, and Three.js. You're comfortable with shaders, dither effects, and SVG animation performance.
• You're solid in WebGL and GLSL. You understand rendering pipelines from the inside, not just as an API.
• You're obsessed with frontend performance. You can profile browser performance bottlenecks and systematically optimize them, especially during extended editing sessions.
• Bonus: you're excited about WebGPU and where it's going.

What you get

• Competitive salary and founding-team equity.
• Health, dental, and vision insurance.
• Relocation to SF, including visa / immigration support.
• Unlimited tokens across every AI model. Use whatever you want, as much as you want.
• A healthy budget for AI tools and any peripherals you need to do your best work.

How to apply

Send us:

1. Your portfolio, resume, GitHub, and your best work.
2. One interaction or animation on the web you think is exceptional and one sentence on why.
3. Tell us about a few design engineers or people whose work you follow and why.
4. Optional: if you'd like, record and send us a quick video : )

P.S. Keep your email short. Let the work speak for itself : )