Design Engineer (UI/UX + Frontend)

In Pakistan, 42% of adults can't read, which shuts them out of most of the internet. Uplift AI (YC S25) is changing that with voice: AI that speaks Urdu the way people actually speak it, already used by Khan Academy and more than a thousand developers, backed by Y Combinator, and built by engineers from Siri, Alexa and AWS.

You'll shape what this technology feels like to the people who use it. You'll talk to customers, spot what's missing, and build it yourself, owning whole parts of the product from the first conversation to the shipped feature. It's a small team with real users, so what you make reaches customers fast and your fingerprints are on all of it.

Top-tier compensation: This role pays at a high end of the market, competitive with the region's leading tech companies. You will work directly under the Founder and work alongside the founding team to ship what you build directly to customers.

What you'll do

• Talk to customers and users regularly. Watch how they work, ask good questions, and figure out the real problem behind what they ask for.
• Turn messy conversations into a clear plan for what to build.
• Design interfaces that feel obvious to use, whether the user is a developer or an operations team at a large business.
• Build those interfaces yourself in the frontend and ship them into a working product.
• Add new features to the existing product without breaking what already works.
• Close the loop. Go back after shipping, see whether it actually helped, and improve it.
• Own how Uplift's products look and feel, and keep them consistent as they grow.
• Bring ideas nobody asked for. If you see something that should exist, make the case and build it.

What you'll bring

• You have shipped something real that people use: a product, a side project, a startup, a university project with real users, or a feature at work.
• You are genuinely good at understanding people. You listen more than you talk, and you can explain why a design works, not just that it looks good.
• You have strong visual taste: layout, spacing, typography and the small details that make an interface feel right.
• You can build what you design. You are comfortable writing frontend code (React or similar), and using AI coding tools to move faster is completely fine.
• You move fast, take ownership, and do things without being told to.
• You want early-stage startup life: ambiguity, speed and real responsibility.

What we are looking for

• You have graduated recently or have 1-3 years of experience.
• You have worked on a product used by people in Pakistan.
• You have run user interviews or usability tests yourself.
• You have built a side project just because you wanted it to exist.

What you don't need

• Mastery of Figma. Sketch in Figma, on paper or straight in code. What matters is that the result ships.
• Years of experience. We're looking at 0 to 3 years, and current students are encouraged to apply.

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