Design Engineer

Please apply here - https://findautumn.com/careers/design-engineer

About Us

We’re building the future of hotel software — an AI-Native Hotel OS that is redefining how hotels operate. We’re replacing fragmented, clunky legacy systems and bloated back-office teams with an intelligent, unified platform. We’ve already proven strong product-market pull and have a fast-growing customer base across the US, Canada, and Mexico.

We’re a seed stage company backed by Tier 1 investors (led by Bessemer Venture Partners), and moving quickly to define a new category in one of the world’s largest verticals.

About the role

Design and build in one motion — taste and production code from the same person. As our founding design engineer you own product surfaces from a rough idea to shipped React, set the craft bar for everything customers touch, and turn the messy, manual work of running a hotel into interfaces that need no manual. This is not a designer-who-hands-off role and not a front-end-from-specs role; it’s a founding product-builder role.

What you’ll do:

• Own product surfaces end-to-end: design in the browser, ship the React, and sweat the typography, motion, empty states, and detail that turn “functional” into “great.”
• Translate complex hospitality workflows — revenue, marketing, guest management, daily operations — into interfaces a busy operator understands at a glance.
• Define the design system, interaction patterns, and overall feel of Autumn as we build it from the ground up.
• Prototype AI-native workflows by driving the most advanced AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, v0) from a sketch to a working, interactive prototype in hours — then turn the best ones into real product.
• Work directly with founders and real operators with high agency and little hand-holding, and raise the quality bar for design, UX, and front-end across the company.

Requirements

We don’t require formal credentials. We do require:

• Exceptional product taste: a portfolio of shipped interfaces where you did both the design and the front-end build, and can explain why each decision was right.
• Strong front-end engineering — fluent in React / TypeScript / Tailwind and modern CSS, with real care for clean components, responsiveness, motion, and performance.
• Full-stack comfort: you don’t need to be an infra engineer, but you can read APIs, data models, and product logic and see how the front end connects to the whole system.
• High agency: you take an ambiguous problem, ask the right questions, make smart assumptions, and move — you don’t wait for a perfect spec.
• Genuinely AI-native: you already build with the most advanced AI coding tools daily and can show how they sharpen both your craft and your pace.
• A clear communicator who thrives on a fast-moving, in-person team and cares about business outcomes, not just UI polish.

Location

• This role is four to five days a week in person in New York City and candidates must be authorized to work in the United States.