Design Engineer

About Scout

Scout is the AI-native operating system for schools.

Our first product, Scout SIS, is a student information system (SIS). At its core, the SIS a database for schools to store student and staff data. Every school has an SIS, but it’s one of the lowest NPS products in the history of software. Legacy players like PowerSchool are multibillion-dollar, rent-extracting companies that squeeze every dollar they can out of schools by locking them into long-term contracts for products that require significant hidden add-on fees to function properly. We’re trying to change that by automating complex back-office workflows across data validation, legal compliance, and government reporting.

We believe that having a highly efficient back-office with access to an interoperable data store will enable school districts to offer the highest quality of instruction to students, and our OS will enable an ecosystem of next-gen edtech software companies to flourish.

Scout is backed by Reach Capital, Rethink Education, Y Combinator, and YC founders including Dan Carroll (Clever), Jinal Jhaveri (SchoolMint), Justin Wenig (Coursedog / Starbridge), Pasha Rayan (Forage / a1base), Will Drevno (Drapr), Kevin Bai & Victor Cardenas (Slash).

About the role

We’re looking for a designer with a strong background in frontend engineering who wants to create delightful experiences for teachers, administrators, parents, and students. At Scout, we care deeply about design: we want to ship software that looks beautiful, feels enjoyable to use, and has clear conceptual models between the possible actions (there are many in Scout) and the way to act upon them.

We believe that a design engineer is not a frontend engineer. We don’t pass off designs and expect you to replicate them; we expect a design engineer to have extremely strong design skills.

Skills: UI/UX design, React & TypeScript

Responsibilities:

• Help us shape the future of our design organization and processes.
• Sit in on sales calls and talk to our customers to deeply understand what we’re building and why each feature matters to our users.
• Design features from the very beginning to be delightful and intuitive.
• Quickly iterate to an MVP that we can ship to our customers.

Requirements:

• BA/BS degree or equivalent experience.
• 3+ years of experience:
  • In UI/UX design (both consumer and enterprise OK).
  • Building top-1%-quality frontend experiences.
  • Building production software in a team environment.
• History of adopting cutting edge technology and software development tools.
• Strong interpersonal skills, including written and verbal communication.
• Deep passion for making a massive impact on the world.

Our tech stack:

• React (NextJS)
• Typescript
• CockroachDB + Prisma
• Temporal
• OpenAI/Anthropic LLMs

About the company

We are a highly collaborative team made up exclusively of 10x engineers. As a group, we:

• take sales/customer calls and debrief
• discuss product/vision decisions
• work through tough engineering problems

But we also expect a high sense of ownership and reliability from our engineers: every engineer is able to take end-to-end ownership to deliver results that matter to our customers.

We work 6 days a week (Mon-Sat) in person in our office in lower Manhattan.

What’s in it for you

• Get your designs into the hands of users within days
• Full autonomy to execute on your own designs without a long, bureaucratic review process
• Develop and lead the design process in an organization that treats design as important as engineering (and as a deeply-ingrained part of the engineering process, rather than a shiny paint of coat applied on top)
• Highly-competitive compensation
• Great benefits, including:
  • Great health, vision, dental insurance
  • Regular team offsites
  • Membership to a gym near the office
  • Monthly book stipend
  • Monthly new-tool stipend
  • Daily food stipend
  • Daily commuter stipend
  • Ability to early exercise stock options for tax benefits
  • Relocation stipend (if applicable)

Recruiters: We only want to hear from applicants. Emails from recruiters will be marked as spam.

About the interview

1st step - complete a 2-hour design engineering challenge

2nd step - hop on a 30 minute call with one of the founders

3rd step - come in person for a 2 day paid work trial where we give you a real feature to understand and design, and ship an end-to-end MVP