---
title: 'Product Design Engineer at C1'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/product-design-engineer-c1-portland-1kz2ys4xhwxf'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-07'
---

# Product Design Engineer at C1

- **Company:** C1
- **Location:** Portland, OR
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-28
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/C1/5f9b5ce2-de6e-4eb4-9a58-d1fdfec09a29

## Job description

[C1.ai](http://C1.ai) is building a horizontal identity platform

Identity is becoming the control plane for modern companies. Every organization runs on dozens—sometimes hundreds—of systems that need to answer the same basic question: who can do what, when, and why?

The old approach doesn’t hold up. It’s either IT teams duct-taping systems together, or rigid IGA tools that only work across a narrow set of HR and SSO integrations. That’s not going to cut it for the next decade.

We’re building something more foundational: a horizontal identity platform that any company—and increasingly, any AI agent—can plug into to understand and manage access. SaaS apps, infrastructure, internal tools, AI agents—if it has a concept of “who,” it should connect to us.

We’re still small, and we move fast. If you want to help build this from the ground up, you’ll have real ownership here.

## The Role

We're looking for a Design Engineer: someone who lives at the intersection of design thinking and hands-on building. This isn't a traditional design role where you hand off specs to engineering. You'll be designing and shipping, often in the same session, with agentic development as a core part of how you work. The right person has strong product design instincts but leads with building. You move fluidly between modern design tools and AI coding harnesses (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or whatever you've tuned for yourself), with the balance tipped toward code. You have a sharp sense for why something should exist and how it should work, and you can move from that clarity to a working implementation quickly. You'll be joining a small, high-output design team where everyone operates with a lot of ownership and autonomy.

## What You'll Do

- Design and build product experiences end to end, from problem framing through working implementation.
- Work across a modern, AI-native toolkit every day: agentic coding harnesses, design tools like Paper and [Pen.dev](http://Pen.dev), prototyping tools like Claude Design, and MCP integrations that connect them. Use whatever gets you from idea to artifact fastest.
- Make design decisions grounded in data. Draw on research and specs from product designers and product managers, and use tools to pull signal from usage, support, and customer feedback yourself, then translate what you find into solutions.
- Contribute to and evolve our design system, ensuring consistency and quality as the product surface area grows.
- Work directly in code to prototype, validate, and ship UI. Not as a novelty, but as your default mode.
- Communicate the why behind design decisions clearly and publicly. We design in the open here.
- Collaborate closely with engineering and product to maintain quality at speed.

You'd Be a Great Fit If…

- You build things for fun. Side projects, tools, prototypes, experiments: you have a track record of making stuff outside of your day job.
- You're all-in on AI tooling and actively use it to accelerate your work. You have opinions about which tools work and which don't, and you're always trying new ones.
- You understand that building well with AI is about orchestration, not volume: planning what to build, managing context deliberately, and writing clear prompts. You know the difference between shouting at a model and actually steering it.
- You have real product design skill (layout, hierarchy, interaction patterns, systems thinking), even if your recent work leans more toward code.
- You have solid Figma experience. It's no longer our primary tool, but it's still part of the ecosystem and you should be fluent in it.
- You're comfortable navigating ambiguity. You can take a vague problem, frame it clearly, and start building toward an answer.
- You understand technical constraints well enough to know when to push for design quality and when to ship the pragmatic solution.
- You have experience building or contributing to design systems.
- You're a clear communicator (written, verbal, and visual) and you default to sharing work early and often.
- You're curious about the frontier of design and AI: how the craft is changing, what new workflows look like, and where the discipline is headed.

Extra Credit

- Experience with identity, security, or infrastructure products.
- Familiarity with React, TypeScript, and modern CSS frameworks.
- Experience with code-native design tools like Paper or [Pen.dev](http://Pen.dev), or building your own agent workflows and skills.

Hiring philosophy

We care about both excellence and grit. You don’t need to check every single box to apply—if this feels like the kind of place you want to build, we’d like to hear from you.

[c1.ai](http://c1.ai) is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.

## About C1

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: C1 provides a unified identity and access governance platform designed to secure and manage access for humans, workloads, and AI agents in the modern enterprise.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2021
- **Founders**: Not publicly available

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Identity and Access Management (IAM), Cybersecurity, AI Infrastructure
- **Target customers**: B2B, Enterprise, and Mid-Market organizations undergoing AI transformation
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To empower organizations to adopt AI securely and at speed by delivering the right access and context to every human, workload, and agent.

## Products & Services
- **C1 Platform**: A unified identity and access governance platform that manages access for humans, services, and AI agents. It provides a universal identity graph, real-time activity monitoring, policy-as-code guardrails, and just-in-time access. The platform is designed to be "headless" and exposes all capabilities via API, MCP, CLI, and Terraform, allowing it to be integrated into any tech stack.
- **AI Access Management**: A specific module for governing access for AI agents and tools across data, cloud apps, and infrastructure. It includes self-service MCP access, identity-aware gateways, and support for custom and on-prem MCPs.
- **Intelligent Access Reviews**: AI-driven, risk-based access reviews to automate and streamline compliance.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of $111M (as of Series B in November 2025)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Greycroft (lead, Series B), Accel, Felicis, CrowdStrike, Fuel Capital, Fathom Capital, Active Capital.
- **Growth Signals**: Raised a $79M Series B in November 2025, signaling strong investor confidence and a focus on scaling the platform for the "agentic era." The company is actively hiring across engineering, sales, and operations roles.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-Mover in AI Identity**: C1 is specifically built for the "agentic era," managing access for AI agents and tools alongside human users, which is a nascent but rapidly growing market.
- **Headless & API-First Architecture**: Unlike traditional IAM tools, C1 is built as a "headless identity infrastructure," exposing all capabilities via API, MCP, CLI, and Terraform. This makes it highly flexible and embeddable for engineering teams.
- **AI-Native Platform**: The platform itself uses AI to drive governance workflows, access reviews, and policy creation, making it faster and more scalable than legacy IAM solutions.
- **Strong Investor Backing**: Backed by top-tier VCs (Accel, Greycroft, Felicis) and a strategic investor in CrowdStrike, providing both capital and credibility.

## Strategic Focus
- **Agentic Identity**: C1 is doubling down on the "agentic era," building the infrastructure to govern access for non-human identities (AI agents, services, API keys) which is a key growth area.
- **Platform Expansion**: Moving beyond traditional IAM to become the "access and context delivery layer" for the entire enterprise, integrating deeply with AI tools and workflows.
- **Go-to-Market**: Scaling sales and channel partnerships (hiring Channel Account Managers) to capture enterprise customers undergoing AI transformation.

## Why Work Here
- **High-Growth Environment**: As a well-funded Series B startup ($111M total), C1 offers the opportunity to work on cutting-edge problems at the intersection of AI and security.
- **Mission-Driven Work**: Employees contribute to building the infrastructure for the "agentic era," a highly relevant and impactful space.
- **Culture & Values**: The company emphasizes empathy, authenticity, and collaboration. It has been recognized by Newsweek as one of "America's Greatest Workplaces 2024" and received a Platinum Bell Seal for workplace mental health.
- **Benefits**: Comprehensive benefits include health coverage, a 401(k) plan with a 35% match up to 10%, 17 days PTO in the first year, paid parental leave, fertility coverage, and flexible work hours.
- **Work Model**: Offers virtual office opportunities and flexible work hours.
- **Engineering Culture**: The platform is built for engineers, with a strong emphasis on API-first, headless architecture, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CLI). This suggests a deep technical culture.

## Sources
1. [c1.ai](https://www.c1.ai)
2. [c1.ai/platform-overview](https://www.c1.ai/platform-overview)
3. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/c1-ai)
4. [onec1.com/careers](https://www.onec1.com/careers)
5. [careers-c1.icims.com](https://careers-c1.icims.com/)

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