Founding Engineer Jobs in California

About Echelon

Echelon is building the AI platform for Business Operations. Our goal is to automate the knowledge work of BizOps so one exceptional operator can deliver the leverage of an entire team, as Ramp and Rippling have done for Finance and HR.

Our platform combines passive process mining with a living ontology that maps how work happens across people, systems, documents, decisions, and outcomes. It connects structured and unstructured data trapped in fragmented, duplicative, and legacy enterprise systems, then turns that context into automated workflows and AI agents.

We are an early-stage company tackling a difficult technical problem at high speed. Designers and engineers work directly with founders and customers, make decisions with incomplete information, ship production systems, and own the results. The pace, rate of change, and standards are high.

The mandate

Define how operators understand and direct AI inside complex enterprise workflows. You will own product design from customer discovery through production implementation, creating a coherent system that makes evidence, decisions, uncertainty, and automated work clear and trustworthy.

What you'll own

• Lead design for core product surfaces spanning process maps, organizational data, evidence, recommendations, workflows, and agents.

• Turn ambiguous customer conversations into flows, prototypes, interaction models, and shipped product.

• Design human-in-the-loop patterns for reviewing plans, granting permission, correcting context, and approving consequential actions.

• Make complex graphs, tables, timelines, and operational states understandable without hiding important detail.

• Build and evolve Echelon's design system, component patterns, information hierarchy, and interaction standards.

• Write production React and CSS for high-leverage surfaces and partner tightly with engineers on the rest.

• Establish lightweight research and usability practices that fit a fast early-stage team.

• Raise the quality bar for accessibility, empty and error states, responsive behavior, visual polish, and product copy.

What you bring

• A portfolio showing exceptional interaction and systems design for complex software, not only marketing sites or consumer flows.

• 5+ years in product design, design engineering, or frontend product work, including meaningful 0-to-1 ownership.

• Fluency in Figma and modern product-design workflows, plus the ability to prototype quickly at varying levels of fidelity.

• Production ability with React, HTML, CSS, and component-based design systems.

• Strong information architecture and data-visualization judgment.

• Experience working directly with customers and turning incomplete requirements into shipped decisions.

• Excellent written and verbal communication, high agency, and low ego.

Useful experience

• AI-native interfaces, agent supervision, workflow builders, collaborative tools, or developer products.

• Enterprise analytics, finance, HR, process mining, knowledge graphs, or other information-dense software.

• React Flow, Tiptap, Recharts, shadcn/ui, Radix, Tailwind, or comparable systems.

• Accessibility standards and inclusive-design practices.

• Motion and state transitions that make autonomous work legible rather than decorative.

Benefits

• Fully covered health, dental, and vision insurance.

• 401(k) plan.

• Team lunches and dinners in the office.

• Unlimited PTO.

Compensation Range: $160K - $220K