Design Engineer
Design Engineer
About Lightberry
Lightberry builds the software layer for expressive, interactive robots. We combine voice AI, perception, and behavior systems so robots can understand people and respond naturally.
We are a small, hands-on team based in San Francisco, working across software, hardware, design, and research to turn new capabilities into robots people can interact with today.
We care about thoughtful craft, fast iteration, and shipping real systems into the world.
Robots with Souls
Yep, you read that right.
Robots are here, but they ship with no software. They’re all mute, deaf, and blind out of the box. The only way to get the robot to do anything is to write code. This is insane.
We want robots to behave like in the movies: proactive, caring, aware.
The role
Robots are a new medium, and the interfaces around them barely exist yet. You’ll invent them: how a person meets a robot, names it, teaches it, trusts it.
You design it and you build it — Figma and TypeScript are both your tools.
What you’ll do
- Design and build the interfaces around our robots: apps, tools, and the moments in between.
- Prototype interactions nobody has patterns for yet, then ship the ones that work.
- Own quality end to end: typography, motion, latency, feel.
- Set the visual and interaction language for a company that cares deeply about craft.
What’s needed
We don’t care about degrees, titles, or seniority. Show us hard problems you’ve solved — projects, repos, systems running in production. We do need:
- Both. You design and you code — genuinely both, not one with a hobby in the other.
- Taste. Your work has a point of view. You can defend every pixel and every easing curve.
- Production. You’ve shipped design that real people use at scale.
- AI-native. It’s 2026. We won’t force AI tools on you, but we expect you to learn to get the best out of them — they’re a real multiplier, and people who skip them get left behind.
- Fun. Side projects, posters, tiny apps — you make things nobody asked for.
Bonus points
- Motion. You’ve done motion design or animation — robots are characters, timing is everything.
- Hardware. You’ve designed for physical products or devices.
One last thing…
Don’t apply if…
- You can’t stand chaos
- You’d work remotely every day if you could
- You’re not a people-person
- You’re pessimistic about tech, AI, and the future
Apply if…
- You want to do your life’s work
- You care about developing and expressing your craft
- You love intense, fast-paced environments
- You like getting your hands dirty, no work is beneath you
- Life’s short, why work on B2B AI SAAS infra slop when you could work on speaking robots?