Design Engineer
- Salary
- $125K - $300K
- Level
- Mid
- Work type
- On-site · San Francisco
Not stated in the posting: visa.
Open. First seen 26 August 2026.
About the role
About idler
idler is a frontier data research lab. We build the evals and environments that the world's leading frontier labs use to measure and train their models.
After raising a $9m seed round led by Paradigm, we spent the last year developing coding evals for top coding models you know and love. At the same time, we've expanded into other domains besides coding: RSI & Auto-Research, Law, Enterprise Business, Cybersecurity, and others. Now, we are facing more lab demand for our data than we can serve, and are rapidly scaling the team to grow the business.
Our approach to creating training data scales using technology, and all of our data products are built on a unified self-reinforcing platform that learns through experience.
You would be joining a close-knit team that has reached product market fit, and your work would directly help to multiply our revenue.
You can see some of our work here: https://idler.ai/collections
About the role
As a Design Engineer at idler, you'll own the visual design and user experience for our customers and internal team. You'll be tasked with producing beautiful applications, pages, interactions, and marketing materials that are a delight to view and use. Our RL environments are novel, complex artifacts that need to be easy to interact with and communicated well. You'll need a founder’s high-level thinking, a designer's taste, and an engineer's precision to succeed.
Examples of what you’ll do
- Create a unified UI, layout and UX paradigm for inspecting and interacting with our RL environments that serves frontier labs and our internal team
- Build a standard library and templates for our marketing materials that are beautiful and compliant with design best practices
- Instrument and visualize our environment tracking system across hundreds of discrete steps and iterations per artifact
What we’re looking for
- Designed and implemented of a successful, full-stack product
- An excellent portfolio showcasing your design work
- Watched users interact with your software and quickly iterated until they loved it
- Strong experience with a modern web app stack (React, Typescript, Node.js)
- 2+ years of product experience
Tech stack
Typescript, React, NodeJS, Postgres, Redis, Vercel, Cursor/Claude Code/Codex, Tinker, Modal, AWS, Daytona, GRPO
Details
- In-person in San Francisco
- Competitive salary + meaningful equity
- Free meals in office
- Healthcare, 401(k), 15 days of PTO per year
- Relocation assistance
- Small, ambitious team
This is an in-person role in San Francisco. We're a tight-knit founding team and we play to win. Join us if you like to win too.
The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY
This role is one of 4 open in Engineering. 1 was posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in October: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
Cybersecurity (4 of 4), TypeScript (4 of 4), AWS (2 of 4), Node.js (2 of 4), PostgreSQL (2 of 4), Python (2 of 4), React (2 of 4)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Offensive Security RL Researcher posted Oct 13
- Forward Deployed Engineer posted Aug 26
- Software Engineer posted Oct 14
From the team and dates on idler's own job board.
Salary context
42 other open postings titled Design Engineer state a salary: median USD 160,000 to USD 227,500 a year.
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