Design Engineer

Our mission is to reinvent how businesses make their biggest decisions.

Tracelight builds AI agents for financial modelling. We have built the most powerful harness for Excel and are now working with 7 of the top 10 consulting firms, alongside PE megafunds and investment banks.

We are building the platform that consulting and finance firms will rebuild around to operate as AI-native businesses - answering what human-AI collaboration looks like when implementation becomes 100x faster. Our work spans new interfaces for human-AI collaboration, our own spreadsheet engine, and agentic, test-driven development for Excel models.

Long-term we will build the AI operating system for the entire strategic decision lifecycle - work that today happens across Excel, PowerPoint, email, and meetings. We believe this category is one of the most fundamental applications of AI, and a $100bn+ opportunity.

We are a small, very strong team, ex Jane Street, Bloomberg, McKinsey, Cambridge, Oxford, UCL. Tech stack is TypeScript for most things and Rust where it matters. The role is 5 days a week in person in our Hoxton (London) office.

The Role

Our customers are financial professionals - highly intelligent, ambitious, and time-poor. They expect tools that are precise, professional, and respectful of their attention. Every surface of Tracelight has to feel that way.

You will join Janek (CPO) and Joao (Design Engineer) to define and ship the end-to-end experience of our product - and the surface area around it, from marketing site to user-facing materials.

Great aesthetic taste and fluency with coding agents (Cursor, Claude Code) and working comfort with TypeScript and React is required. 

The ideal candidate also leans into one of two directions on top of strong design fundamentals:

• Code-leaning: you can take a Figma file or a rough idea and ship the implementation yourself in our codebase. You hold your own in a discussion about a React component, catch code smells, and own meaningful pieces of implementation end-to-end.

• Client-leaning: you have a strong command of language, understand (or can quickly learn) financial modelling and the workflows of consultants/bankers/PE professionals. We are forward-deployed and want every touchpoint with the client to feel excellent - not just the product. You can lead on the marketing site, landing pages, sales collateral, onboarding, tutorial content, in-product copy, and the broader experience around using Tracelight.

What you will do

• Own UX for features we ship - bring the right intuition for what good looks like, and the empathy to design for users whose time and attention are scarce.

• Push our product toward a high level of polish and consistency - clean, minimal, precise, confident.

• Depending on your lean, either implement designs directly in our codebase, or own marketing surfaces (website, landing pages, sales and onboarding materials, in-product copy).

• Establish and extend our design system alongside Joao.

• Work closely with engineering to ship at pace - small team, short feedback loops, high standards. 

• Sit with users and prospective users; let what you learn shape what you ship next.

To apply

Send us your CV, portfolio, GitHub, and any samples of work or websites you are proud of. 

A three-bullet summary of your strongest relevant work is welcome. 

Process

1. Call with our CPO - walk through your portfolio and review a few websites together to understand how you look at design

2. Take-home task 

3. Paid on-site day with the team

Email careers@tracelight.ai