Founding Design Engineer @ Mesa
Mesa
Design
USD 120k-200k / year + Equity
Posted on Jun 2, 2025
🏜️
Founding Design Engineer @ Mesa
Sound like a good fit? Email founders@mesa.dev with 2-5 bullets on what makes you exceptional.
Our mission
The pace of software development is a civilizational bottleneck.
Your bank, school, space program, and favorite cereal brand rely on software to function. However, even the world’s best technical organizations slow to a crawl as their teams scale.
The Mesa is the world’s first living codebase: an AI-powered repository that enables teams to ship faster by automating reviews, fixes, and maintenance. You can think of Mesa today as an AI-native successor to Github, but we will ultimately manage and accelerate the entire software development lifecycle.
Mesa will allow teams to ship software as quickly as they can dream it.
Our team
Mesa’s founders are:
Oliver Gilan - founder of Antimetal, engineer at Microsoft and Census (backed by a16z and Sequoia)
Ben Warren - YC founder, engineer at Microsoft and Census
Mesa is backed by top seed investors, including Aditya Agarwal (ex-CTO of Dropbox, early engineer at Facebook), Soleio Cuervo (ex-Head of Design at Dropbox, first designer at Facebook), Ethan Yu (Founder of Motion), and Boris Jabes (CEO & Founder of Census).
The role
We’re looking for the “Dream Architect” — a founding teammate who can imagine the world of Mesa, design new interaction primitives, and write code that brings those designs to life.
Why design The Mesa?
Not just another SaaS dashboard: Most SaaS today is copy-paste — a few dashboards, lists, and forms. Mesa is creating new primitives for building and understanding application logic; the features that we invent will be emulated by the next generation of builders.
Be seen by the world’s greatest builders: Our early investors and users invented search, the feed and the like button. From day 1, your designs will empower great builders to create the next big thing.
Build for yourself: Mesa brings together engineering, product, and design in a single collaboration layer. You will use Mesa every day to build and ship software.
You’ll be a good fit if you…
Believe that transcendent form emerges from close attention to function. You think holistically about user experience. You have the taste to meld ergonomics, performance, and aesthetics.
Know how to 80/20 effectively. Velocity is the result of making smart tradeoffs.
Aren’t afraid to write code. AI empowers designers to leave their mark on a codebase. You’re ready to create a design system not just in Figma, but in code as well. You feel comfortable mocking up page designs using React and TailwindCSS.
Want to grind and be recognized. Effort is the only input that is entirely in our control. We stay focused and stay late, because nothing feels better than the recognition that we’ve built something great.
Location
We are based in San Francisco and work in-person every day from our office in South Park. We work from home on weekends.
Compensation & Benefits
Compensation: $120k - $200k, 0.5% - 4% equity
Healthcare: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision for you and your family
Transportation: We pay for your commute to the office
Other: We provide complimentary lunch and snacks at the office