[Hiring] Founding Design Engineer @Substrate

October 20, 2026

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Role Description

Substrate builds financial infrastructure to grow industrial GDP. We're hiring a Founding Design Engineer to lead the effort to make Substrate's products feel insanely great. You'll work at the intersection of design, product, copywriting, and full-stack engineering, shipping 0→1 experiences that power machine shops, farms, factories, construction contractors, and more.

Why consider Substrate amidst your sea of options:

You believe in objective good and beauty, and you want to bring them to an antiquated, predatory industry.
You believe not all technology is created equal. You don’t care about building another enterprise SaaS tool, you want to build tools that advance civilization.
You want to work with people who treat their work as craft, who violently reject “just good enough,” and you want to help build that culture.

What you’ll do:

Own the full arc: from customer pain → UI/UX design → prototype → shipped product.
Design and build beautiful, simple interfaces on top of gnarly complexity and legacy systems.
Write growth-optimized product copy that converts users across the product funnel.
Spin up fast, high-fidelity mockups and working prototypes to pressure-test ideas before we build.
Help build a product culture that harmonizes speed, taste, and customer obsession.

Qualifications

You have serious taste in UI/UX, and you can point to interfaces you've designed that prove it.
You're a great writer.
Growth.design is something you'd enjoy reading.
You love LLMs.
You've built design systems.
You're a React wizard.
You love experimenting with tools like Mobbin and Figr.
You can implement basic back-end features like modifying database schemas.
You can overlap at least 6 hours with PST working hours (8am-5pm PST).
You resonate with our engineering philosophy.

Requirements

Compensation: $100-$160K base + $35,000-70,000 equity.
Fully remote.
Unlimited PTO.

Next Steps

If you are interested, please apply via Dover AND email kelvin@joinsubstrate.com with the following (your app won't be considered without these). Keep answers to less than 3 sentences each:

If you could have one person's career arc, who would it be and why?
What's the most insanely great thing you've ever designed? Include a link or video so we can see!
Your current time zone and confirmation you can have 6 hours of overlap with PST working hours.
Availability for a 30min call.

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