
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.