Design Engineer (Product) at Poolside building developer tools powered by frontier AI. Own product vision in 0-to-1 spaces, prototype rapidly, and partner with engineering to ship agentic systems for software development.
In this decade, the world will create Artificial General Intelligence. There will only be a small number of companies who will achieve this. Their ability to stack advantages and pull ahead will define the winners. These companies will move faster than anyone else. They will attract the world's most capable talent. They will be on the forefront of applied research, engineering, infrastructure and deployment at scale. They will continue to scale their training to larger & more capable models. They will be given the right to raise large amounts of capital along their journey to enable this. They will create powerful economic engines. They will obsess over the success of their users and customers.
Poolside exists to be this company: to build a world where AI will be the engine behind economically valuable work and scientific progress. We believe the fastest way to reach AGI lies in accelerating software development itself, by reshaping the developer experience with agentic systems, coding assistants, and the frontier models that power them. We deploy these systems directly into the development environments of security-conscious enterprises.
We were founded in the US and have our home there, but our team is distributed across Europe and North America. We get our fix of in-person collaboration (and croissants) in Paris each month for 3 days, always Monday-Wednesday, with an open invitation to stay the whole week. We also do longer off-sites once a year.
Our team is a multidisciplinary blend of research, engineering, and business experts. What unites us is our deep care for what we build together. We’re in a race that requires hard work, intellectual curiosity, and obsession; to balance this intensity, we’ve assembled a team of low ego and kind-hearted individuals who have built the special culture Poolside has. By building collaboratively and with intention, we create a compounding effect that moves the entire company forward towards our mission: reaching AGI through intelligence systems built for software development.
This is a role for someone who wants to define what gets built, not just how it looks. You'll own product vision in 0-to-1 spaces, working at the frontier of what Poolside should build next, translating ambiguous problems into clear product direction, and prototyping fast to validate ideas before they become roadmap. You'll work closely with engineering and leadership, partnering tightly with our product design team to shape experiences that sit at the intersection of frontier AI and developer tooling.
The problems here are genuinely hard and the surface area is wide. One day you're digging deep to understand how developers experience a new agentic workflow; the next you're building a proof-of-concept that changes the direction of a product. Your taste and judgment will be visible in what ships.
YOUR MISSION
To forge the product direction for Poolside's developer experience, defining what we build at the frontier of AI and software development.
Own product vision in 0-to-1 spaces, defining what Poolside should build and translating ambiguous problems into clear, buildable direction.
Lead design, experimentation, and proof-of-concepts that explore what's next for developer tools, feeding insight back into the product roadmap.
Partner with Product Engineering to move ideas from concept to shipped product, working at both the strategic and the granular level.
Prototype rapidly and validate early; you're as comfortable in code as you are in a design tool.
Collaborate with designers and the wider design team to ensure product thinking is consistent and well-resourced across Poolside's surfaces.
Shape how Poolside shows up externally as a product, including how developers first encounter our work.
Strong product intuition with a history of defining what to build, not just how to build it. You've forged direction, not just executed on it.
A genuine history of building with code: scripts, tools, personal projects shipped from scratch. You can speak concretely to what you built and why.
Genuine familiarity with developer workflows. Version control, local environments, the command line, deployment pipelines. Not as a curiosity, but as your natural habitat.
Deep experience designing for developer tools specifically, not general consumer or enterprise products.
Strong visual craft. You produce polished, high-quality UI and can hold a high bar across the full product experience.
Comfortable with rapid prototyping, research, and proof-of-concepts. You move fast and validate early.
Highly autonomous: you set your own direction, bring others along on your thinking, and make good decisions in ambiguity.
Intro call with one of our Designers
Design interview with a Design Engineer (Product). Come with 1–2 projects you forged, not just executed
Technical interview with a Product Engineer. Expect questions on how you build and think about developer workflows
Team fit call with the People team
Final interview
Fully remote work & flexible hours
37 days/year of vacation & holidays
Health insurance allowance for you & dependents
16 weeks of flexible, full-pay parental leave
Well-being, always-be-learning & home office allowances
Company-provided equipment
Frequent team get togethers
Diverse & inclusive people-first culture