Design Engineering Intern

• Location: Remote (United States)
• Work Model: Remote
• Industry: AI recruiting and talent marketplace (B2B SaaS)
• Compensation: $35–$50 per hour

About the Company

TalentPluto is a Y Combinator-backed startup building the hiring stack for high-growth companies. We run two connected products: a talent network that places engineering, go-to-market, and operations people into fast-moving startups, and an AI recruiting tool that lets a hiring team run candidate search, tiered enrichment, rubric-based scoring, and outbound campaigns directly from their assistant. We work with dozens of venture-backed startups across AI, developer tools, fintech, and healthcare.

The team is small and founder-led, and interns work on live problems rather than practice ones.

The Opportunity

This is a design engineering internship, which means the same person decides how something should work and then builds it. You will take ideas that arrive as a sentence or a rough sketch and turn them into interfaces people actually use, owning the visual and interaction decisions along the way rather than waiting for a spec.

We care about craft here in a way that is easy to claim and harder to do: spacing, hierarchy, typography, and the small interaction details that make a product feel considered. Because the team is small and the surface is still being shaped, your judgment about how something should feel carries real weight, and you will see the result in front of users quickly.

Responsibilities

• Design and build product surfaces end to end, from low-fidelity idea to shipped interface.
• Own layout, typography, hierarchy, and interaction detail across the surfaces you build.
• Implement in React, Next.js, and TypeScript, working with the backend services behind each surface.
• Build and extend shared components so the product stays visually consistent as it grows.
• Make interfaces work well across screen sizes and states, including the empty and error ones.

Requirements

• Strong taste for product design, interaction design, and visual detail.
• Experience building with React, Next.js, TypeScript, or similar frontend tools.
• Comfort working from low-fidelity ideas and turning them into usable interfaces.
• Strong understanding of layout, typography, hierarchy, and responsive design.
• Has shipped design or frontend projects, whether independently, in class, or through prior work.
• Clear communicator who can work independently in a remote environment.