---
title: 'Product Design Engineer at Outset'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/product-design-engineer-outset-san-francisco-2hcx36egc9yy'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-19'
---

# Product Design Engineer at Outset

- **Company:** Outset
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $170k–$220k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-08-05
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-19
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/outset/731d6783-7b2b-4d6a-bffd-ba7a5b51de44

## Job description

Outset invented a better way to do research: AI-powered user interviews.

Global brands like Hubspot, Microsoft, Uber and Nestle use Outset to achieve deeper, qualitative insights about their users at unprecedented speed and scale.

The research industry is massive (>$140B and growing) and ripe for disruption. Incumbents are outdated, slow, and burdened by high-cost services. That's our opportunity.

Outset is backed by top Silicon Valley investors and raised a $30M Series B in December 2025—less than six months after our Series A—led by Radical Ventures with participation from M12 (Microsoft’s venture arm), 8VC, Y Combinator, and Adverb Ventures.

The raise follows a breakout year, with our business growing 8x as enterprise customers across industries adopt our category, AI‑moderated research, as the new standard for understanding people.

We’re a tight-knit team serving some of the world’s largest enterprises.

We're looking for a product designer with exceptional craft who is comfortable designing on canvas and in code. We are calling this a Design Engineer, but we recommend not getting caught up in the title. So much has changed about what it means to do "design work". The toolkit has expanded to include tools like Codex and Claude Design, and now, our team is spending just as much time generating and molding prototypes as organizing canvases in Figma. And yet, strong opinion and interest in craft are still timeless skills that are essential to this role. You'll join a small design team of two and own projects from the kernel of an idea to a feature customers use every day. You'll work directly with our Head of Design and founders on generative product experiences that are functional and beautiful.

## Responsibilities

- Hold a high bar for craft. Produce wireframes, interaction designs and high-fidelity visuals, and sweat the details in the shipped product.
- Know what not to build. Question features that add complexity without adding much value, and help the team cut scope down to what matters most. Often, less is more.
- Prototype in code. Build functional, front-to-back prototypes with real data when that's the quickest way to settle a question or prove a concept.
- Ship to production. Take features from concept to merged PR. Write frontend code and work with engineers on the parts that need them.

## Qualifications

We don't have many explicit requirements, and exceptional candidates might bend these rules.

- 3+ years of product design industry experience.
- Exceptional communication skills.
- Strong but loosely held opinions on design and product.

## Preferred Qualifications

- Experience building enterprise software.
- Experience building in the research industry.

We're a small team that enjoys designing together in person. Near our desks in the San Francisco office there's a budding design library with books we pass around and find inspiration from. Walking meetings are our default whenever we can manage them, and some of our best ideas have come from loops through the city's parks and along the Embarcadero waterfront. At least once a week, the design team huddles with Outset’s PMs and founders to critique design work and brainstorm together.

## About Outset

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Outset is an AI-moderated research platform that combines conversational AI, behavioral intelligence, and emotional analysis to let companies run high-quality qualitative interviews and research studies at massive scale.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Aaron Cannon (CEO) and Michael Hess

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Software Development / AI-Moderated Research & Insights Platform
- **Target customers**: Enterprise research teams (UX/Market/Consumer Insights), large corporations, and product teams (B2B, Enterprise)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "The future of innovation begins with listening to humans." Understanding people’s needs, motivations, and behaviors is the hardest and most important challenge for businesses; Outset makes that understanding effortless and scalable.

## Products & Services
- **AI-Moderated Interviews**: Conduct hundreds of AI-moderated interviews simultaneously in any language (video, voice, or text). The AI moderator dynamically probes participants based on audio and visual cues to uncover the "why" behind answers.
- **Instant Synthesis & Analysis**: Automatically generates highly relevant summaries, themes, impactful quotes, and customizable highlight reels based on research objectives, eliminating manual tagging and sifting.
- **Participant Recruitment**: Recruit hundreds of participants directly within the platform, or share an interview link with any external list.
- **Guide Set Up**: Effortlessly set up interview guides using AI, with qualitative/quantitative questions, advanced probing guidelines, and intelligent skipping logic.
- **Easy Stakeholder Shareout**: Get instant top-line reports, custom AI-generated reports, highlight reels, and ready-to-share PowerPoint decks to integrate research into decision-making.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Annual Revenue of USD 8,500,000 (as of latest data). Total Funding of USD 51,250,000.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Lead investors include **Radical Ventures** (Series B), **8VC** (Series A), with participation from 24 investors in earlier rounds. Trusted by enterprises like **Microsoft**, **Nestle**, **Uber**, **Hubspot**, and **Away**.
- **Growth Signals**: Massive headcount growth of **+563.6% year-over-year** (now 54 employees). Customer research coverage from 1.1B+ possible participants across 85+ countries, with over 500K studies run on the platform.

## Competitive Advantages
- Proprietary AI that bridges the "say-do gap" by probing in real-time based on audio and visual cues, not just recall.
- Multi-modal, multi-lingual scaling: enables research in any language, at any timezone, with continuous, multithreaded AI-moderated conversations.
- Enterprise-grade simplicity: designed for large research teams, removing scheduling friction and operations overhead so research happens in days, not months.
- End-to-end platform: from participant recruitment, guide setup, AI-moderation, to instant analysis and stakeholder shareout — a single integrated suite.

## Strategic Focus
- Expand leadership in replacing traditional, slow qualitative research (surveys, live interviews) with instant, scalable AI-moderated studies.
- Deepen enterprise penetration with top-tier clients (Microsoft, Nestle, Uber, HubSpot) by continuing to add advanced behavioral and emotional analysis features.
- Scale the platform’s capabilities to cover the entire research lifecycle more comprehensively, continuing to invest heavily in R&D.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture highlights**: "Supportive founders and seasoned investors foster community, without startup toxicity." Team is described as "smart, kind, and driven teammates who know how to make work fun." Founders are very hands-on and accessible.
- **Remote/hybrid/office policy**: Primarily in-office at a "million-dollar office space" in SF with sweeping views and quick access to Market Street.
- **Notable perks**: Daily catered lunches and snacks with flexible dietary options, unlimited PTO, comprehensive health insurance (medical/dental/vision), unlimited budget for productivity tools, commuter benefits, allowance for continuing education, 401k with 6% match.
- **Engineering culture**: A strong technical focus (backend and frontend engineers) working on state-of-the-art AI and NLP. 9 active job postings across sales, engineering, marketing, design, and operations.
- **Who should apply**: People passionate about AI, user research, and building products that make human understanding scalable. The company values balance, growth, and high-impact work without "startup toxicity."

## Sources
1. [outset.ai](https://outset.ai/)
2. [outset.ai/careers](https://outset.ai/careers)
3. [linkedin.com/company/outset-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/outset-ai)
4. [ycombinator.com/companies/outset](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/outset)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/outset](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/outset)

## Other roles at Outset

- [Marketing Lead - EMEA](https://feeny.ai/job/marketing-lead-emea-outset-london-m76tbfccg8am) — London, United Kingdom
- [Platform Security Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/platform-security-engineer-outset-san-francisco-t92pgz80ddez) — San Francisco, CA
- [Researcher](https://feeny.ai/job/researcher-outset-san-francisco-agq2gg9angkn) — San Francisco, CA
- [Head of Workplace Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-workplace-operations-outset-san-francisco-ss1by8ah9192) — San Francisco, CA
- [IT Automation Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/it-automation-engineer-outset-san-francisco-51s41knafzqw) — San Francisco, CA
- [Account Director](https://feeny.ai/job/account-director-outset-san-francisco-yarryqq4qat7) — San Francisco, CA
- [Recruiting Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/recruiting-coordinator-outset-san-francisco-ty8cq9r4xk9w) — San Francisco, CA
- [Product Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/product-marketing-manager-outset-san-francisco-hv2qcx62mr95) — San Francisco, CA
- [Scaled Customer Success Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/scaled-customer-success-manager-outset-san-francisco-drq1c7t7mptp) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/research-manager-outset-san-francisco-9gv2eapx6xyq) — San Francisco, CA