---
title: 'Senior Design Engineer at AssemblyAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-design-engineer-assemblyai-chicago-w7wy70w21fmm'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# Senior Design Engineer at AssemblyAI

- **Company:** AssemblyAI
- **Location:** Chicago, IL
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-08-20
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/assemblyai/jobs/4726292005

## Job description

## Why AssemblyAI

AssemblyAI builds the best-in-class Voice AI models powering the next generation of voice applications. Our models serve 600M+ inference calls monthly, process 1M+ hours of audio daily, and power 2 billion+ end-user experiences. The Voice AI space is at an inflection point; we’re looking for folks truly excited to join a small team and help define the future of the industry.

We are one of the most capital-efficient AI companies on the planet - with under 100 people generating roughly $500K ARR per employee, we sit among the top 5 most revenue-dense teams within the fastest-growing AI companies today. That's not an accident; it's a deliberate choice to stay lean, move fast, and give every person on the team outsized ownership and impact. With thousands of customers including Granola, Fireflies, Figure AI, and CallRail, the company has real scale - processing over 2 million hours of audio daily and handling more than 1 million API calls every day. This is a rare growth-stage opportunity where the business is proven and the trajectory is steep, but the team is still small enough that your fingerprints are on everything.

If you've ever felt buried under layers of bureaucracy, starved of real ownership, or frustrated watching your work disappear into a slow-moving org, AssemblyAI is built differently. The company operates as a true meritocracy, with no heavy planning or approval processes and no gatekeeping on the tools or information you need. For anyone who genuinely cares about voice AI, not as a trend to chase, but as a technology to build,  this is the place where the most interesting problems at the most interesting scale are being solved by a team small enough that you'll actually know everyone's name.

We’re committed to creating a space where our employees can bring their full selves to work and have equal opportunity to succeed. No matter your race, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, origin, ability, age, veteran status, if joining this mission speaks to you, we encourage you to apply!

About the role:

We're looking for a Senior Design Engineer to own the craft and feel of AssemblyAI's product experience end to end. This person will design and build the interfaces our developers live in, from the Playground to the dashboard, and hold the bar on how everything looks, moves, and feels, not just whether it works. This person should have a strong design background paired with real frontend engineering ability, and be deeply interested in what exceptional product design looks like in an AI-native, developer-facing product.

You lead with design. Engineering is how you bring that design to life, because you don't have to hand your vision off to someone else to build it. You care about the details other people skip: interaction states, motion, hierarchy, information density, the difference between a UI that works and one that feels right.

This is a cross-functional role that requires close partnership with engineering, marketing and sales, and the judgment to move from a rough idea to a polished, shipped experience without waiting for a spec.

What You’ll Do:

- Own the visual and interaction design of our core product surfaces, then build them in production React and TypeScript
- Set the bar for UX quality across the product: interaction states, motion, hierarchy, and the details that separate a working interface from one that feels considered
- Take rough product ideas and turn them into polished, high-fidelity experiences, prototyping quickly to pressure-test direction before we commit
- Shape and steward our design system and visual language so quality scales as the product grows
- Partner directly with engineering and marketing on direction, not just execution
- Use AI tooling and agents as a core part of how you work, designing and shipping faster because of it

What You’ll Need:

- A strong portfolio of shipped product work that demonstrates real design taste and craft
- Genuine UX and visual design ability, from concept through high-fidelity execution
- Deep proficiency in Figma, comfortable moving from low-fidelity exploration to high-fidelity, dev-ready designs and maintaining shared component libraries
- Solid frontend engineering skills, comfortable building production interfaces in modern React and TypeScript
- Fluency with AI-assisted design and development, and a real instinct for building AI-native interfaces
- Comfort operating with ambiguity and owning outcomes end to end

Nice To Have:

- Motion design chops, comfortable using animation and micro-interactions to make an interface feel alive and guide attention, not just decorate it
- Illustration or visual storytelling ability, able to create original graphics, diagrams, or brand-aligned artwork that elevates the product and marketing surfaces
- Experience designing for developer platforms or API-first products, and a feel for what makes technical tools intuitive to build on

Pay Transparency:

AssemblyAI strives to recruit and retain exceptional talent from diverse backgrounds while ensuring pay equity for our team. Our salary ranges are based on paying competitively for our size, stage, and industry, and are one part of many compensation, benefit, and other reward opportunities we provide.

There are many factors that go into salary determinations, including relevant experience, skill level, qualifications assessed during the interview process, and maintaining internal equity with peers on the team. The range shared below is a general expectation for the function as posted, but we are also open to considering candidates who may be more or less experienced than outlined in the job description. In this case, we will communicate any updates in the expected salary range.

The provided range is the expected salary for candidates in the U.S. Outside of those regions, there may be a change in the range which will be communicated to candidates throughout the interview process.

Salary range: $180,000 - $240,000 AI to Interview:

If you’re selected for an interview, please review this [resource](https://www.assemblyai.com/candidate-ai-guidance) to better understand how AssemblyAI approaches the use of AI in our interview process.

GDPR privacy notice:

Candidates from the EU should review [this job applicant privacy notice](https://www.assemblyai.com/legal/gdpr-job-applicant-and-worker-privacy-notice) before applying.

Keep Exploring AssemblyAI:

[Speech-to-text](https://www.assemblyai.com/products/speech-to-text) | [Streaming speech-to-text](https://www.assemblyai.com/products/streaming-speech-to-text) | [Speech Understanding](https://www.assemblyai.com/products/speech-understanding) | [LLM Gateway](https://www.assemblyai.com/products/llm-gateway)[Try the Playground](https://www.assemblyai.com/playground/source) [Our $50M Series C fundraise](https://www.assemblyai.com/blog/announcing-our-50m-series-c-to-build-superhuman-speech-ai-models/) [Check us out on YouTube!](https://www.youtube.com/@AssemblyAI)

## About AssemblyAI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: AssemblyAI provides developer-first Voice AI infrastructure to transcribe, understand, and act on human speech.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series C)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2017
- **Founders**: Dylan Fox

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Voice AI, Speech Recognition, Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure
- **Target customers**: B2B – developers, enterprises, and product teams building voice-enabled applications (e.g., meeting assistants, voice agents, contact centers, medical scribes)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “Advancing and democratizing Voice AI technology for the world” – creating superhuman Voice AI models to unlock new classes of applications leveraging voice data [assemblyai.com/about](https://www.assemblyai.com/about)

## Products & Services
- **Pre-recorded Speech-to-Text API**: Transcribe recorded audio and video with industry-leading accuracy.
- **Real-time Speech-to-Text API**: Live transcription for voice agents, captions, and agent assist.
- **Voice Agent API**: Speech-to-speech agents over a single WebSocket.
- **Speech Understanding API**: Extract structured insights (speaker identification, key information, etc.) from transcripts.
- **Guardrails**: PII redaction, profanity filtering, and content moderation on transcripts.
- **LLM Gateway**: Apply frontier language models to voice workflows.

All offered as APIs with usage-based pricing [assemblyai.com](https://www.assemblyai.com/).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding – **$158.1M** across five rounds (Seed, Venture, Series A, B, C)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Accel (lead in Series A, C), Insight Partners (lead in Series B), Y Combinator, Daniel Gross, Nat Friedman, Patrick and John Collison, Smith Point Capital.
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Processes over **1M hours of audio daily** and **600M+ inference calls monthly**; powers **2B+ end-user experiences**. [greenhouse.io job board](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/assemblyai/jobs/4648353005)
  - Universal-Streaming model released mid-2025 drives **25x usage growth in streaming** over six months, now processing ~1.5M streaming hours per week.
  - Headcount of 69 employees (‑12.2% YoY) [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/assemblyai)
  - Annual revenue estimated at $10M (LinkedIn estimate) [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/assemblyai)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Research-oriented organization**: Team includes interdisciplinary research leaders, scientists, and engineers dedicated to advancing state-of-the-art Voice AI [assemblyai.com/about](https://www.assemblyai.com/about).
- **Best accuracy-latency-cost tradeoff** in the industry, especially with the Universal-Streaming model.
- **Developer-first API** with simple usage-based pricing and comprehensive documentation, lowering barriers to adoption.
- Proven at scale with enterprise customers like Zoom, Granola, Fireflies, Cluely, and Calabrio.

## Strategic Focus
- Continue advancing Voice AI models (e.g., promptable speech recognition, multilingual support) to enable entirely new application categories.
- Scale adoption among AI-native startups and large enterprises.
- Maintain velocity in research and product releases (recently shipped Universal-Streaming, keyterms prompting, and multilingual features).

## Why Work Here
- **Remote-first culture** with a global team spanning 16 countries; physical offices in New York and San Francisco [assemblyai.com/careers](https://www.assemblyai.com/careers).
- **Competitive compensation**: market-rate salaries, equity grants for all employees, uncapped PTO, up to 4% 401k match (US-based), $1,000 home office stipend.
- **Premium benefits**: medical/dental/vision with up to 100% premium coverage for employee and family, HSA/FSA, disability, life insurance.
- **Team offsites**: regular company and team retreats in various locations.
- **Engineering culture**: focus on interdisciplinary research, fast shipping, and building one of the next great AI companies. Open roles include Senior Software Engineer (Go – LLM Team), Forward Deployed Engineer, and Developer Relations Evangelist [greenhouse.io](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/assemblyai/jobs/4648353005).

## Sources
1. [assemblyai.com – About](https://www.assemblyai.com/about)
2. [assemblyai.com – Careers](https://www.assemblyai.com/careers)
3. [assemblyai.com – Homepage](https://www.assemblyai.com/)
4. [LinkedIn – AssemblyAI Company Page](https://www.linkedin.com/company/assemblyai)
5. [Greenhouse – AssemblyAI Job Board](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/assemblyai/jobs/4648353005)

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