---
title: 'Design Engineer at Grit'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/design-engineer-grit-san-francisco-1pgygm6sm5eh'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# Design Engineer at Grit

- **Company:** Grit
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2023-11-06
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/grit/am9icG9zdDodf48a5cTOdomi83xQbtAE

## Job description

## Our Mission

[Grit](https://www.grit.io/) is on a mission to crush technical debt.

We believe that a big challenge in the next decade will be crumbling digital infrastructure. Our entire modern economy runs on code, but we haven’t developed appropriate tools to ensure software remains reliable over time.

Companies know that technical debt threatens the reliability of their services and slows down the pace of innovation, but struggle to find enough engineering talent to fix issues—most software maintenance today is still done manually and delayed as long as possible.

We believe there is a better way: we’re building AI bots that automatically maintain software through a combination of static analysis, our own [query language](https://docs.grit.io/language/overview), and machine learning.

Founders Fund and Abstract Ventures led our [$7M seed round](https://venturebeat.com/programming-development/grit-debuts-with-7m-round-offering-ai-that-auto-analyzes-and-updates-software-codebase-for-devs/) and we have many paying customers on our beta product. Our team is currently 5 engineers.

## About the role

You will lead design for Grit, working closely with the founder and other engineers to conceptualize interfaces for programming the future. Your work will answer questions like:

- When most code is machine-generated, what do new developer interfaces look like?
- How do we teach developers a new way of programming?
- What is the most effective way to educate the next generation of developers in an ML-first world?
- How can program graphs be represented with less complexity, allowing rapid comprehension?
- What parts of the developer experience should still be artisanal when software is built at industrial scale?

Your work will consist of building interactive prototypes, including designing new concepts from scratch and implementing your ideas with code. Yes, we know that’s rare—since this is a developer product, we find developers have the best intuitions for how to design it.

## Responsibilities

- Design new interfaces for analyzing source code and managing the software development lifecycle.
- Contribute to, maintain, and ultimately use our Figma/React component library to streamline new interfaces.
- Prototype new UI interactions and write CSS/JS to turn your ideas into code.

## Qualifications

- Experience designing creative application interfaces demonstrated in a strong portfolio.
- You have demonstrated experience writing CSS and JavaScript/TypeScript.
- Execution-driven mindset: you love shipping.
- Interest in programming languages (ex. compilers) or machine learning is a plus, but not required. You’ll learn more on the job!
- Comfortable working in low-structure environments and navigating unknown unknowns.

## Why you should join us

- Build a meaningful product to solve a tangible problem for companies.
- Ownership in all senses of the word: significant equity upside, direct impact on product vision, and contact with users.
- Solve your own problems. We dogfood our own product and you can build the ideal developer experience as you work.
- Explore frontiers in programming languages and machine learning.
- We have a long runway and can offer a competitive base salary (up to $250k).

Location Policy We believe that the most impactful work is done through high bandwidth in-person collaboration, particularly at an early-stage company. Most of the team works from our NYC office, near Union Square. Exceptions are possible for candidates with a demonstrated track record in related fields.

⚡ If this role sounds interesting to you, please apply below. Even if you’re not quite sure, we encourage you to apply anyway.

## About Grit

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Grit puts software maintenance on autopilot with fully automated migrations and AI-assisted refactoring.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage) — **Acquired by Honeycomb in April 2025**
- **Headquarters**: New York, NY, USA
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Not fully named in public sources; job postings reference leadership by "Cosmin" and "Morgante" (likely co-founders)

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: Developer Tools, Software Engineering Automation, AI for Code, Static Analysis
- **Target customers**: B2B, Enterprise/SMB engineering teams with legacy codebases, framework migrations, and technical debt
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "Crush technical debt" — Grit believes a big challenge of the next decade will be crumbling digital infrastructure, and is building AI bots that automatically maintain software through static analysis, machine learning, and a custom query language.

## Products & Services
- **Grit (core platform)**: AI-powered software maintenance platform that automatically generates pull requests for code migrations and refactoring. Delivered as a web app (React), CLI (TypeScript), and backend (GraphQL + TypeScript).
- **GritQL**: An open-source query engine for searching and transforming source code, designed to make simple searches easy while supporting complex transformations.
- **Static analysis + ML toolchain**: Combines codebase analysis with AI to target fixes and framework upgrades at scale.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private); acquired by Honeycomb on 2025-04-10
- **Key Metric**: **Total funding: $7.2M** — $7M Seed round (Aug 2023) led by Founders Fund and Abstract Ventures, plus a $200K grant.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Founders Fund, Abstract Ventures, Quiet Capital, 8VC, A\* Capital, AME Cloud Ventures
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Acquired by observability leader Honeycomb in April 2025, combining Grit's codebase analysis engine with Honeycomb's observability tools.
  - GritQL open-sourced in March 2024.
  - Multiple active job openings across engineering, design, and infrastructure roles.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Unique tech combo**: Static analysis + machine learning + a custom query language (GritQL) enables deep, automated code transformations unmatched by typical linters or codemods.
- **Autonomous maintenance**: Generates ready-to-merge pull requests, reducing manual engineering effort for migrations and refactoring.
- **Dogfooding**: Grit uses its own product internally, ensuring the developer experience is battle-tested.
- **Backing + acquisition**: Strong early investors and now the resources and distribution of Honeycomb.

## Strategic Focus
- Continuing to develop AI agents for software maintenance and migration.
- Deep integration with Honeycomb's observability platform to connect codebase analysis with runtime insights.
- Scaling open-source adoption of GritQL and expanding from beta to broader release.
- Hiring across compiler/PL engineering, cloud infrastructure, design engineering, and full-stack roles.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & mission**: High-impact work on "crushing technical debt" — a tangible, meaningful problem for every software company.
- **Early-team ownership**: Significant equity upside, direct influence on product vision, and regular contact with users.
- **Compensation**: Competitive base salary (e.g., up to $250K for Senior/Staff Software Engineer) plus meaningful equity.
- **In-person collaboration**: Most of the team works from the NYC office near Union Square; some roles (e.g., PL/Compiler Engineer) are remote within the US.
- **Technical challenge**: Work at the frontier of programming languages, static analysis, ML, and developer experience. Dogfood your own product and help design the ideal developer workflow.
- **Post-acquisition resources**: Team is now part of Honeycomb, offering stability and broader platform impact.

## Sources
1. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/grit-grit-io)
2. [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/getgrit)
3. [zoominfo.com](https://www.zoominfo.com/c/grit/566158297)
4. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/job/senior-staff-software-engineer/8890466)

## Other roles at Grit

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