Join Knapsack to bridge the gap between design and engineering through code, systems thinking, and intelligent tooling. Help build a platform where design systems, AI, and product infrastructure come together to shape the future of software creation.
About Knapsack
At Knapsack we’re building an AI Product Engine for digital product creation. Our mission is to eliminate the gap between what teams design and what they build. We do that by grounding every tool, agent, and workflow in a living, intelligent source of truth.
We’re not building another AI wrapper or a glorified assistant. We’re building a foundational platform — the MCP (Model Context Protocol) server — that powers the next generation of intelligent product development. Our Composition Advisor helps teams validate, compose, and evolve UI intelligently. Our Ingestion Agent pulls meaningful patterns from codebases, Figma, and other artifacts to bootstrap structured systems from chaos.
We’re not solving a well-understood problem. We’re inventing new territory.
Overview
We’re hiring a Design Technologist to help bring Knapsack’s design system intelligence to life through functional, expressive, and scalable front-end code. This is a hybrid role — part engineer, part designer — for someone who lives in that rare middle space where aesthetics meet implementation.
You’ll work alongside product designers, engineers, and system architects to prototype intelligent interfaces, contribute to reusable UI components, and help define the connective tissue between design artifacts and live product. This is a foundational role with real impact on how our system feels, behaves, and scales.
What we think you’ll do
Depending on your strengths and the evolution of the product, you might:
- Prototype intelligent UI concepts that combine data, interaction, and system logic
- Build and maintain a library of design system components, tokens, and documentation
- Translate Figma designs and design system logic into usable, scalable code (likely in React)
- Collaborate with prompt strategists and engineers to prototype interaction models for our AI agents
- Help shape how design tokens, component metadata, and system structure are ingested and represented in our platform
- Work across product and design to ensure interaction fidelity and implementation consistency
- Build tools and utilities that make it easier to design and build with intelligence baked in
What we think you’ll need
- 4–7+ years of experience building front-end experiences with a strong design sensibility
- Fluency in HTML, CSS/SCSS, and JavaScript/TypeScript (React is our core framework)
- Deep familiarity with Figma, including how to navigate, inspect, and collaborate with designers
- Experience working with design systems (tokens, components, documentation, structure)
- A strong sense of visual design, layout, spacing, and motion — you care about the feel as much as the function
- Curiosity about AI, systems thinking, and how design artifacts become structured, programmable inputs
- Comfort operating in ambiguity and contributing to early-stage product definition
Bonus points for
- Experience with structured design system platforms (e.g., Knapsack, Storybook, Backlight)
- Familiarity with design-to-code automation or component metadata frameworks
- Prior work in creative coding, UI prototyping, or motion design
- Experience building tools for developers, designers, or systems teams
- Understanding of how structured UI data could power AI reasoning or generation
Why it matters
This isn’t just a front-end job. It’s a systems role at the intersection of design, engineering, and intelligence. The work you do will help define how structured design inputs fuel intelligent interfaces — not just in our product, but in the tools our users build. We’re building something new, and we’re doing it with care, intent, and a long-term view.
If you’ve ever said:
“I live in the space between design and engineering”
“I want to build systems, not just screens”
“I want to work on something truly foundational”
…then let’s talk.
Location
Remote friendly (US-based). Knapsack is a fully remote company, headquartered in Portland, OR.
Compensation & Benefits
- $80k - $100k salary +equity
- Flexible, remote-first work culture
- Unlimited PTO
- Fully covered health insurance
- A thoughtful, ambitious team building something truly original