What are the responsibilities and job description for the Founding Design Engineer position at Kinetic?
What is PayMe
PayMe helps people find and claim money they are already owed. It sits at the intersection of consumer product, trust, conversion, and financial outcomes.
That makes design unusually important. The product has to feel clear, trustworthy, and worth acting on.
What we need
PayMe needs a founding designer who owns the frontend experience end to end. This person should make the product clearer, tighter, more trustworthy, and more worth paying for.
The center of gravity is design. Taste matters more than raw engineering depth. But this cannot be a pure designer. We want someone who has already crossed into shipping real product work, mostly with modern AI tools.
Who you are
Strong consumer app taste
Real product thinking
Meaningful shipped work, either a large side project or an awesome feature at work
Clear explanation of what you designed versus what you built
Real interest in moving further into engineering over time
Why it's exciting
You will own the frontend experience, not just a slice of it
You will work on the highest-leverage parts of the product: onboarding, activation, paywall, and conversion
You will have real influence over how PayMe feels and performs
You will work on a small team where good ideas ship fast
What you own
The frontend product experience end to end
The quality bar for key user flows
Designing and improving onboarding, activation, paywall, and other conversion-critical surfaces
Turning fuzzy product questions into sharp design hypotheses and shipped improvements
Using AI and lightweight implementation ability to help move frontend work forward
What success looks like
Onboarding gets clearer and tighter
Activation improves
Paywall and conversion flows improve
The app feels more coherent and polished
Design stops being a bottleneck
What you're not here to do
Be a pure visual designer who hands things off
Be a backend or systems engineer
Wait for perfect specs before moving
Act as project manager for everyone else
Our process
15 min screen with Kinetic's Lead Engineer
Half-day async paid project
Deep dive with Kinetic's Founding Designer
Team conversations, including PayMe's General Manager
Internal work day, with a possible second day depending on how it goes
Target turnaround ~2 weeks from start to finish.
Salary : $140,000 - $180,000