Sapien

Product Engineer at Sapien (New York, NY)

Sapien· New York, NY·

Role details

Work type
Onsite
Employment
Full-Time

Job description

Who we are

Sapien is the engine behind the world’s most important companies. We build agents that learn how a business works from its financial and operational data: its language, operations, and economics. That understanding helps people find opportunities, make better decisions, and act. We work with complex businesses, from manufacturers and restaurant groups to the Fortune 500. Teams at companies including Bayer, Cooper Standard, Blink Charging, Carlex, and Odeko use Sapien to understand their businesses and improve how they run. Our ambition is to build the self-optimizing company by making its people and systems dramatically more capable. We’re headquartered by Madison Square Park in NYC, with $15M+ raised and backing from General Catalyst, Neo, and operators from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Ramp, and Stripe. We’re bringing together AI researchers, engineers, and operators to build intelligence for the people who build everything else.

The role

You'll design and build the interfaces that make AI agents usable for finance and operations teams. This means creating new interaction patterns for how humans work with autonomous systems, building the design systems that scale across our platform, and obsessing over the details that make complex workflows feel simple. This is a design-focused frontend role where craft and user experience matter deeply. You'll own the visual and interaction design of features while implementing them in production.

What you'll do

  • Design and build interfaces that make agent operations transparent and controllable. Create new interaction patterns for real-time AI workflows, verification systems, and human-in-the-loop feedback that don't exist yet.
  • Prototype and iterate rapidly on new interface concepts. Work directly with customers to test designs, watch how they interact with features, and refine based on real usage.
  • Design information hierarchies that surface the right data at the right time. Help users understand complex financial operations, agent reasoning, and data relationships without overwhelming them.
  • Establish design standards and documentation that help the team ship consistent, high-quality interfaces as we scale.

What we're looking for

  • Product thinking about user experience. You've designed features, tested them with users, and iterated based on how people actually use them.
  • Experience building or contributing to design systems. You understand component architecture, tokens, consistency, and how design scales across a product.
  • Ability to balance beauty with function. You care about aesthetics but know when to prioritize usability, performance, and shipping.
  • Frontend development experience with React and TypeScript. You can implement your designs in production-quality code, not just hand off mockup
  • CS degree or equivalent experience. We care most about what you've built.

How you work (values we care about)

  • Ownership: You see designs through to production. You don't stop at mockups. You implement them, refine interactions based on how they feel in the browser, and fix polish issues until it's right.
  • Opinionated: You have strong perspectives on what makes good design and aren't afraid to advocate for user experience. You push back on features that would make the product worse and propose better solutions.
  • Mission-driven: You understand that interface decisions determine whether finance teams trust and adopt AI. You care about building products that transform how businesses run.
  • Collaborative excellence: You elevate the team's design thinking. You give thoughtful feedback on interfaces, share design patterns and techniques, and raise the bar for polish across the product.

Why work at Sapien

  • Culture: Values ownership (end-to-end ownership of research, product, and customer work), inquisitiveness (always pushing for the "why" and "so what"), and adaptability (solving different, harder problems). The team is described as "talent-dense" and sits at the intersection of complex AI research, beautifully simple product, and high-impact use cases.
  • Work Policy: On-site in New York City (NYC). All open roles are listed as on-site/full-time.
  • Notable Perks/Engineering Culture: Engineers own key aspects of research, product, and customer work end-to-end. The company builds systems that understand context, adapt in real time, and help teams make sharper decisions. Open-ended problem scopes are a core part of the day-to-day.

Application questions