Senior Software Engineer, UX

About the role

You will own the end-to-end craft and feel of AssemblyAI's product experience, designing and building the interfaces our developers interact with daily across the Playground and the dashboard. You will set the bar for how everything looks, moves, and feels, ensuring UI quality is never an afterthought but a core engineering responsibility. This role requires close collaboration with engineering, marketing, and sales to translate rough ideas into polished, shipped experiences without waiting for lengthy approval cycles. You will use AI tooling and agents as a core part of your workflow, designing and shipping faster because of intelligent automation. You will shape and steward our design system and visual language so quality scales reliably as our product and customer base grow. You care about the subtle details other teams skip, such as interaction states, motion, hierarchy, and information density that define an intuitive interface. You will partner directly with stakeholders to drive direction, not just execute against specs, ensuring the product feels exceptional at every touchpoint. This is a cross-functional role where judgment and ownership matter more than process, allowing you to move quickly and build what truly matters.

Key facts

What you'll do

Shape and own the visual and interaction design of our core product surfaces, then translate those designs into production-grade React and TypeScript code.

Establish and enforce the highest standards for UX quality across the product, including interaction states, motion, hierarchy, and information density.

Take rough product ideas and rapidly prototype them to pressure-test direction before committing to full implementation.

Design, iterate, and maintain our shared design system and visual language so quality scales efficiently as the product and team grow.

Partner directly with engineering, marketing, and sales stakeholders to define product direction and ensure alignment on goals and outcomes.

Leverage AI tooling and agents as a core part of your workflow to design, prototype, and ship features faster and with higher quality.

Conduct design reviews and provide thoughtful critique that elevates the overall craftsmanship of the product across the team.

Translate complex user needs and product requirements into intuitive, developer-friendly interfaces that feel seamless and powerful.

Advocate for the user at every level of the organization, ensuring that the developer experience remains exceptional and coherent.

Collaborate with product managers and engineers to prioritize work, define requirements, and deliver polished experiences on schedule.

Contribute to frontend best practices, code quality, and architectural decisions that keep our UI robust and maintainable over time.

Participate in hiring and mentoring junior designers and engineers by providing clear design principles and hands-on guidance.

Continuously measure and iterate on product performance, using data and user feedback to refine and improve the interface over time.

Represent AssemblyAI in the broader design and developer communities by sharing insights and learnings that strengthen our brand.

Requirements

A strong portfolio of shipped product work that demonstrates real design taste, craft, and an eye for high-quality user experiences.

Genuine UX and visual design ability, with experience taking ideas from concept through high-fidelity execution across multiple devices.

Deep proficiency in Figma, including comfort moving from low-fidelity exploration to high-fidelity, dev-ready designs and maintaining shared component libraries.

Solid frontend engineering skills, with the ability to build production interfaces using modern React and TypeScript.

Experience working with design systems and component libraries, and a track record of contributing to or scaling them effectively.

Strong understanding of user-centered design principles, accessibility, and responsive layouts that work across different screen sizes.

Comfort collaborating closely with engineers, product managers, and sales teams to align on goals and make informed trade-offs.

A bias for action, with the ability to move quickly from idea to prototype to polished interface without waiting for extensive approvals.

Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal, to articulate design decisions and collaborate effectively across teams.

A passion for voice AI and developer-facing products, with a desire to solve complex problems at scale in a fast-moving environment.

Ability to manage multiple priorities and deliver high-quality work in a fast-paced, growth-stage startup environment.

A commitment to learning and improving, actively seeking feedback and applying it to strengthen your designs and code.

Willingness to engage in hands-on work across the design and frontend spectrum, switching between strategic thinking and detailed implementation as needed.

An interest in how AI tools can enhance your creative and engineering workflows, and experience incorporating them into your process.

Nice to have

Experience contributing to open source projects or building public-facing applications that demonstrate your skills.

Familiarity with audio, voice, or speech-related products and an understanding of the unique challenges in this domain.

Previous work in high-scale API-driven environments where performance and reliability are critical.

Practical notes

This is a full-time position based in the United States.

The role requires hands-on design and frontend work, so candidates should be comfortable switching between strategic thinking and detailed implementation.

Travel is not required for this role.

No visa sponsorship is mentioned in the source material.

There are no application deadlines specified in the source.