Founding Design Engineer

About Noto

Noto is the AI-native operating system for after-school businesses: tutoring centers, music schools, sports academies, and dance studios. About 180,000 of these businesses operate in the U.S., and millions of kids pass through them every week.

They’re run by people who are passionate about teaching but spend their evenings managing schedules, payroll, and parent emails—often in software built in 2011, or in spreadsheets and sticky notes.

Noto replaces the entire stack with a modern platform for scheduling, billing, payroll, marketing, CRM, communications, classroom management, and student and parent portals. We bring the whole back office into one place, with AI agents that automate manual work instead of simply tracking it.

A school that spends less time on paperwork can teach more kids, hire another teacher, and grow its business. Come help us build the best operating system for these small-business owners!

(Fall 2026 team offsite: magic shows, lawn games, trivia, friendly competition, bartender-made drinks, and a cookout 🔥)

Team

We’re a team of about 20 in New York City: smart, collaborative, ambitious, and genuinely nice to work with.

AJ Ding (CEO) — second-time founder who previously built an AI recruiting company. ML engineer and data scientist at Quora, Lyft, and Meta. Studied statistics at Yale and grew up in a family of small-business owners.

Steve Wang (CTO) — former Head of Engineering at Nitra, an a16z-backed vertical SaaS company for doctors. Previously worked in data science and engineering at Lyft. Studied math at Harvard.

We’ve raised $4M from Base10 Partners and South Park Commons.

Location

• Four days in the office at Herald Square and one day remote
• One week per quarter working from anywhere
• Occasional travel for team offsites and customer visits

The Role

The founding design engineer will own how Noto looks, works, and reads. This is an opportunity to define the design foundation for a product our customers rely on all day—and to make it genuinely intuitive and delightful. You’ll combine design and engineering with strong product judgment, taste, and empathy for users, taking ideas from the first sketch through the shipped experience.

Our users spend six hours a day in Noto across a wide range of workflows. The product has grown quickly, and some parts are more complex than they need to be. You’ll have the scope and ownership to bring clarity, cohesion, and craft to the entire experience. You will:

• Own the design of the entire product—from layouts and workflows to the words on every screen.
• Design and build your own projects end to end, from the UI to the database.
• Set the quality bar for design and shape other engineers’ work from early scoping through final polish.
• Identify the moments that confuse or slow down our customers, then redesign and build better solutions.
• Establish the components, patterns, and copy standards that define how the team builds.

This is not marketing or brand work. It’s hands-on product ownership, with the freedom to shape both what we build and how we build it.

Ideal Candidate

• Four or more years designing and building software products
• Full-stack ability. You’re comfortable with our stack (React, Next.js, Node, and Postgres), can use AI to ship features end to end, and can tell when AI-generated code is wrong.
• Product judgment. You can take a messy workflow, such as rescheduling a missed lesson for a family with three kids, and make it simple. You can explain why your version works.
• Care for words and small details. Labels, error messages, empty states, and emails to parents matter to you as much as layout does.
• Comfort with ambiguity. Much of what you’ll work on starts with unstructured customer call notes. You go to the source, talk to the owner or front desk, and uncover the real problem.
• Bonus: you’ve been the first or only designer at a company, or you’ve designed complex operational software such as scheduling, billing, or admin tools.
• Interest in helping education businesses thrive

Culture

As our first design engineer, you’ll have a huge impact on how we build our product and shape our design culture. Here’s what’s true today:

• Serve the customer. Our users run small businesses. We sit in their schools, attend their…