Founding Design Engineer | CodeSpeak

About the role

Role: Founding Design Engineer (Senior / Staff) Company: CodeSpeak Location: London, on-site. Ideally you already live in London. Candidates based elsewhere are welcome to apply, and remote is possible for a very strong candidate, but UK-based candidates come first. Candidates with a Global Talent visa, granted or in process, are a good fit. Job Type: Full-time About CodeSpeak Agents write more code every month. Human brains stay the same. CodeSpeak is building a program model that sits one level above code, so people can see how a program works and changes over time without reading much of it. The goal is to give control back to the developer: you think about architecture, and the routine goes away. CodeSpeak was founded by Andrey Breslav, the creator of Kotlin, which millions of developers use daily. Around him is a team that has built the tools other engineers rely on, at Google, Databricks, Perplexity, JetBrains, Sourcegraph, and Elastic. When it comes to program analysis and developer tooling, these are some of the best people in the world. CodeSpeak is backed by Accel and by funds that also invested in Hugging Face and Mistral, and funding covers several years. Here is the open problem. The team has a fair idea of what the program model should look like. It does not yet know how to visualise it. As Founding Design Engineer you will decide how it looks, then build it and ship it. The core engineering team has just been hired, and nobody on it has design-engineering skills. You are the missing piece. CodeSpeak is a UK company. It has no business in Russia and no ties to Russian companies. It is still testing which problems it can solve best, so priorities may shift. What you are expected to do: Design and delivery Own how people interact with CodeSpeak: in the CLI, on the web and on any future platform. Design the interfaces yourself. Build many prototypes, decide on the right UX and ship the result. Harden the prototypes users liked, so they hold up on real data, with the same care for performance and product quality as for design. Ship features to production without help from the rest of the team. Product problems CodeSpeak works with unusually complex information: developer intent, requirements, code, architecture, the relationships between them, how they change over time, contradictions and dependencies. The job is not to display it, but to help developers understand it, navigate it and act on it. Find a way to visualise CodeSpeak's new, higher-level program model. In your first 30 days, visualise the architecture of a codebase split into components. Go deeper from there: a single component, its diff and its code review. Then interfaces that let developers navigate structured requirements and how they relate to each other, review requirements alongside code review, see how requirements map onto parts of the codebase, explore how intent, architecture and code change over time, browse agent sessions, find contradictions between requirements, and edit and reorganise requirements rather than only view them. Web UI is the simplest and most obvious platform. Some of this will live in the console. VS Code plugins and other desktop frameworks may follow, and the final scope is still open. Ways of working Find tasks and clarify requirements without waiting for a brief. Nobody will micromanage you. Egor and Andrey give general direction. Work directly with the founder and the engineering team to turn early ideas and hypotheses into intuitive, interactive product experiences. Take part in design meetings, where many decisions are made on the spot. Explain and defend your design decisions to Egor and Andrey. Both hold strong opinions, and both argue hard. Argue for your tasks, and step back with good grace if the team disagrees. What you need to succeed: Craft You can design an interface, prototype it and ship it to production on your own. You have strong design taste, and your portfolio shows it: UX, interaction d

Skills