Design Engineer (Intern)

Background

Substrate builds financial infrastructure to grow industrial GDP.

We're hiring a Design Engineering Intern to help make Substrate's products look and feel insanely great. You'll work at the intersection of design, product, copywriting, and full-stack engineering, shipping 0→1 experiences that power machine shops, farms, factories, construction contractors, and more.

Substrate engineering interns have immense ownership to lead full-stack product cycles end-to-end, from customer discovery to production deployment. You'll get to occasionally travel with the founder to factory floors, meet Main Street manufacturers and Wall Street lenders face-to-face, and build exactly what the field demands.

Given the design complexity of our product and the high degree of ownership we trust interns with, we've found engineers typically take 6-8 weeks to fully onboard and lead their own projects. Therefore, we strongly prefer candidates who can commit to an 8-month+ internship. We occasionally make exceptions for those who are truly exceptional.

Why consider Substrate amidst your sea of options:

• You believe in objective good and beauty, and you want to bring them to an antiquated, predatory industry.

• You believe not all technology is created equal. You don’t care about building another enterprise SaaS tool, you want to build tools that advance civilization.

• You want to work with people who treat their work as craft, who violently reject “just good enough,” and you want to help build that culture.

What you’ll do:

• Own the full arc: from customer pain → UI/UX design → prototype → shipped product

• Design and build beautiful, simple interfaces on top of gnarly complexity and legacy systems

• Write growth-optimized product copy that converts users across the product funnel

• Spin up fast, high-fidelity mockups and working prototypes to pressure-test ideas before we build

• Help build a product culture that harmonizes speed, taste, and customer obsession

You’ll be a great fit if...

• You have serious taste in UI/UX, and you can point to interfaces you've designed that prove it

• You're a great writer

• You love reading about the history of design and artistic styles

• You can spin up fast mockups and demos in Figma, Lovable, or similar feels like second nature

• You live in design references like Mobbin and move fast with frontier AI design tools like Figr

• growth.design is something you'd enjoy reading

• You love LLMs and are the kind of person to max out on tokens

• You resonate with our engineering philosophy

Next Steps

If you are interested, please apply via Dover AND email kelvin@joinsubstrate.com with the following (your app won't be considered without these):

• If you could have one person's career arc, who would it be and why?

• What's an unpopular truth you believe in?

• What's the most insanely great thing you've ever designed? Include a link or video so we can see!

• Availability for a 30min call