Staff Designer (Rapid Prototyping)

Join Thunderbird, an open-source AI client designed for organizations that need more control over their data, infrastructure, and model choices. As a Staff Designer, you will shape the product experience for Thunderbolt, transitioning it from early development to enterprise use cases. You will create working prototypes, define interaction patterns, and contribute production-quality front-end code. This role requires strong front-end engineering skills, experience with AI-enabled product experiences, and a user-centered perspective.

• Construire des prototypes fonctionnels et des expériences utilisateur prêtes pour la production directement dans le code de Thunderbolt.
• Traduire des idées de produits ambiguës, des flux de travail utilisateur, des retours de partenaires et des besoins d'entreprise en expériences produit claires et utilisables.
• Définir les modèles d'interaction pour les fonctionnalités alimentées par l'IA, telles que le chat, la recherche, l'automatisation des flux de travail et l'administration d'entreprise.
• Experience designing, prototyping, or building AI-enabled product experiences, such as chat, search, research tools, agents, automation, knowledge interfaces, or workflow tools where user trust, context, output quality, and human oversight are central to the experience
• Experience providing technical or product leadership through mentoring, cross-functional coordination, reusable patterns, project ownership, or influence beyond individual deliverables
• Portfolio, case studies, shipped work, or examples demonstrating design-to-code execution, interactive prototypes, or product experience improvements
• Experience translating ambiguous product concepts into usable workflows, prototypes, and shipped product experiences, with the judgment to balance speed, quality, maintainability, learning, and product risk
• Strong front-end engineering skills, including experience with modern JavaScript or TypeScript, component-based frameworks, and building prototypes or production features directly in an application codebase
• Practical awareness of AI, privacy, security, and regulatory considerations that may affect product experience, including transparency, user control, permissions, data handling, and trust; familiarity with frameworks such as the EU AI Act, Cyber Resilience Act, HIPAA, or comparable responsible AI, privacy, and security requirements
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, including experience working closely with product managers, designers, engineers, and other cross-functional stakeholders
• 10+ years of relevant experience in design engineering, front-end engineering, UX engineering, product design with strong technical implementation experience, or a closely related role, with demonstrated leadership and impact beyond individual deliverables
• Strong product and interaction design judgment, including usability, accessibility, information architecture, workflow design, and product polish
• Experience with enterprise software, developer tools, productivity tools, collaboration tools, self-hosted software, or other technical user workflows
• Experience contributing to design systems, component libraries, reusable front-end architecture, or shared product interaction patterns
• Familiarity with user research, usability testing, product discovery, feature instrumentation, or rapid experimentation methods
• Experience working in open-source or highly collaborative engineering environments