UX/UI Engineer

**About us** We are a small early-stage (pre-Series A) startup building AI-powered software for clinical research teams at academic medical centers. We turn dense, unstructured trial protocols into structured, usable data, so the people running studies spend less time wrangling documents and more time on the work that matters. **The Role:** We need someone who can sit between dense, technical clinical-trial workflows and the people who use them every day, and make the complicated feel obvious. High autonomy, high ownership, low process. You will have real influence over the product, not a backlog of pixel-pushing tickets. **Why this role exists** We build software for clinical research teams at academic medical centers. The problems we solve are genuinely hard: turning long, unstructured protocol documents into structured data and usable interfaces that coordinators rely on for high-stakes, detail-heavy work. Our team is strong on the systems side. We think logically, algorithmically, and we build robust pipelines and data models. What we are missing is a design-first voice: someone whose instinct is to start with the user, question complexity, and relentlessly simplify. You would own that perspective and raise the bar for the entire product experience. This is not a "take the spec and build the screens" role. You will help decide what the screens should be. **What you'll do** - Own the end-to-end experience for key workflows, from problem framing and user research through interaction design, prototyping, and shipped front-end code. - Turn complex, information-dense tasks into clear, low-friction interfaces. Reduce clicks, cognitive load, and the chance of error for expert users doing repetitive, high-stakes work. - Translate real user behavior into design decisions. Talk to users, watch them work, and bring that evidence back to the team. - Build production UI for our application in React, and maintain a coherent, reusable component system. - Design and build our public-facing website, owning how we present the product to the world. - Establish and grow our design system: tokens, components, patterns, and the documentation that keeps them consistent. - Be the advocate for the user in a room full of engineers who naturally think in systems and edge cases. Push back, propose alternatives, and explain the "why" behind design choices. - Partner closely with backend and platform engineers so the experience and the data model serve each other. **Who you are** - You start from the user, not the feature list. When you see complexity, your first question is whether the user should ever have to see it. - You hold both craft and pragmatism: you care about typography, spacing, and interaction detail, and you also ship. - You can design and build. You move fluidly between Figma and a code editor and do not need a separate engineer to make your designs real. - You communicate design decisions clearly to a technical audience and welcome being challenged on them. - You are comfortable being the design conscience of a small team, setting the standard rather than inheriting one. - Good with clear thinking and communication. **Must Have** - 3+ years building and designing user interfaces, or a closely related blend of design and front-end engineering. - Degree in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) preferred. We also welcome strong candidates with degrees in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical fields. - Strong UI/UX design fundamentals: interaction design, information architecture, visual hierarchy, and the judgment to know what to cut. - Figma fluency: components, variants, auto layout, prototyping, and building or maintaining a design system. - Comfortable using Claude as part of your daily design and prototyping workflow. Our team relies on Claude, including Claude Design, to communicate ideas and build prototypes quickly, and you should be excited to work the same way. - Production front-end engineering with React, in…