Clerk AI

Staff Design Engineer at Clerk AI (San Francisco, CA)

Clerk AI· San Francisco, CA·

Job description

Staff Design Engineer

Clerk Chat | Full-time

About Clerk Chat

Clerk Chat is a conversational AI platform that handles customer communications across SMS, voice, and email channels. Recently Series A funded, we're scaling our engineering team with strategic focus on AI Voice and RCS initiatives.

What You'll Do

  • Design and evolve analytics and monitoring interfaces for AI agent performance tracking, execution monitoring, and real-time alerting systems and conversational interface.
  • Create intuitive conversational experiences that integrate analytics visualizations, inspired by modern chat interfaces like Perplexity
  • Work directly with the CTO and engineering team to develop UI/UX for complex multi-channel communication management (SMS, voice, email)
  • Champion user experience and accessibility across our platform, maintaining a high quality bar for both technical and non-technical users
  • Contribute to the design and development of reusable component patterns for agent configuration, dashboard visualization, and real-time data displays
  • Collaborate with engineers on elegant and consistent component APIs using TypeScript/React, with focus on developer experience
  • Advocate for users by identifying areas of improvement in our analytics interfaces, agent monitoring dashboards, and communication workflows
  • Participate in day-to-day team rituals like design crit, story creation, weekly stand-ups, and sprint planning
  • Help us hire more amazing people to grow the team and bring diverse perspectives to our design process
  • Document design patterns, guidelines, and best practices for our growing product surface area

What You Need

  • Minimum 5 years of tech/startup or digital product agency experience, or equivalent
  • Strong proficiency in Figma and modern design tools
  • Extraordinary visual design skills with strong understanding of UX/UI principles, particularly for data-heavy interfaces and analytics platforms
  • Front-end development skills in semantic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (React preferred) - ability to collaborate closely with engineers and understand implementation constraints
  • Experience designing complex dashboards, monitoring tools, or analytics interfaces
  • Strong organizational skills and love for documentation
  • Excellent communication and collaboration skills, bridging the gap between design and engineering
  • Comfort working in a technical environment with APIs, webhooks, and developer-focused products

Nice to Have

  • Experience with conversational UI/chat interface design
  • Understanding of AI/ML products and their unique UX challenges
  • Background in real-time data visualization and monitoring systems
  • Experience maintaining design systems or reusable component libraries
  • Familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol) or API-driven architectures
  • Experience at growth-stage startups (Series A/B)

Why work at Clerk AI

  • Growth trajectory: The company exploded from founding in 2023 to $10M ARR and a $7M seed round by 2024-2026, indicating strong product-market fit and rapid scaling.
  • Engineering culture: Emphasis on cutting-edge AI infrastructure (sub-500ms latency, auto-scaling, edge inference) — ideal for engineers passionate about real-time systems and NLP.
  • New Montréal hub: The newly launched Montréal engineering hub (approx. 15 hires) offers a chance to be an early team member in an international expansion, with a focus on prompt engineering and conversational AI. The company is actively hiring for that location.
  • Remote/Hybrid: Not specifically stated, but headquarters are in San Francisco. The new Montréal hub suggests a growing distributed team.
  • Leadership: CEO Alexander Haque (McGill alum, ex-Netflix, ex-Samsung Innovation) has a track record of scaling AI products and deep domain expertise in telecom and customer service.
  • Notable perks: Work on a platform that processes millions of customer interactions daily across voice, RCS, SMS, and WhatsApp. Direct access to foundational AI models and enforcement of cutting-edge compliance automation.

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