Staff Design Engineer (AI Product)

Role overview

Join Mozilla as a Staff Design Engineer for Thunderbolt, an open-source AI client. You’ll shape the product experience by turning ambiguous product ideas and workflows into clear interaction patterns and working prototypes—often implemented directly in code.

Key missions

• Build functional prototypes and product experiences directly in Thunderbolt’s codebase.
• Translate ambiguous product concepts (user workflows, partner feedback, and enterprise needs) into usable, shippable product experiences.
• Define interaction models for AI-powered capabilities such as:
  • chat
  • search
  • workflow automation
  • enterprise administration

Responsibilities

• Create prototypes and establish product interaction patterns with a focus on usability, accessibility, and workflow design.
• Collaborate closely with product, design, engineering, and enterprise-facing teams.
• Balance speed, quality, maintainability, learning, and product risk when shipping AI-enabled UX.
• Provide leadership through mentoring, reusable patterns, coordination, and ownership.

Requirements

• Strong product/interaction design judgment: usability, accessibility, information architecture, workflow design, and product polish.
• Experience designing/prototyping/building AI-enabled product experiences (e.g., chat/search/research tools/agents/automation/knowledge or workflow tools), with emphasis on user trust, context, output quality, and human oversight.
• Strong collaboration and communication with cross-functional stakeholders (PMs, designers, engineers).
• Ability to turn ambiguous concepts into usable workflows, prototypes, and shipped experiences.
• 10+ years in relevant areas such as design engineering, UX engineering, product design with technical implementation, or closely related roles.
• Strong front-end engineering skills with modern JavaScript or TypeScript and component-based frameworks, able to prototype and build production features.
• Portfolio/case studies demonstrating design-to-code execution and interactive product improvements.
• Practical awareness of AI, privacy, security, and regulatory considerations affecting UX (e.g., transparency, user control, permissions, data handling; familiarity with frameworks such as EU AI Act or similar requirements).

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with enterprise software and technical productivity/collaboration workflows (including self-hosted or developer tools).
• Familiarity with user research, usability testing, product discovery, instrumentation, and rapid experimentation.
• Contributions to design systems, component libraries, reusable front-end architecture, or shared interaction patterns.
• Experience working in open-source or highly collaborative engineering environments.