Design Engineer

About Us and the Problem

We're building the best search for AI.

Search is becoming the core primitive for AI, every agent workflow, every reasoning system, every tool call needs context from the web and beyond. Agents are rapidly becoming the dominant users of web information, but today's search infrastructure was built for a different era. We're building the stack that makes the web accessible to how agents actually work: content at scale, structured for reasoning, designed for deep research across thousands of sources.

But search infrastructure is only as useful as the solutions built on top of it. Each operates in a different domain with different workflows, different users, different definitions of what "good" looks like. Someone needs to understand those worlds, design the right experience, and build it. That's this role.

We're a small team out of UCL's CS department that loves building things. We want someone who can think like a designer and ship like an engineer and who's excited about figuring out how AI search actually gets used in the real world.

What You'll Be Doing

• Client Solutions: Work directly with clients to understand their domain, users, and problems. Design and build production applications on top of Valyu's search and deep research APIs.
• Product & UX Design: Conceptualise workflows, user experiences, and interfaces for knowledge-intensive domains. You own the full arc from concept to working product.
• Production Code: Build what you design. Frontend, integration layers, workflow orchestration, whatever the solution needs. This is not a mockup-and-handoff role.
• Domain Fluency: Get smart fast in unfamiliar industries. One week it's biotech patent search, the next it's financial research tooling. You'll develop enough depth to ask the right questions and design credible solutions.
• AI-Native Building: Design and build AI-powered features and agentic workflows. Use AI tools as core parts of your own process: coding, research, prototyping, all of it.

Who You Are

Targeted at recent graduates and early-career builders who sit at the intersection of design and engineering.

• You have genuine design taste and visual sensibility. You've always cared about how things look and feel. Maybe you took Art or Graphics at GCSE, maybe you've been designing on the side forever. Either way, aesthetics aren't an afterthought for you.
• You write real code and ship real projects. Our stack is Next.js, TypeScript, Python, Supabase, and Vercel, running on AWS and GCP, but we care more about what you've built than which frameworks you know.
• AI tools are already part of how you work. You use them to build faster and think better, and you're comfortable designing AI-powered applications: agentic workflows, LLM integrations and RAG applications.
• You learn fast. You can walk into patent law or drug discovery and within days be designing useful things.
• You communicate clearly. You'll be in rooms with clients, explaining your thinking, presenting designs, understanding requirements.
• Be Cracked.

Bonus Points

• A portfolio or collection of side projects that shows both design taste and technical chops.
• Experience with any of: Next.js, TypeScript, Python, Supabase, Vercel, AWS, or GCP.
• Familiarity with search systems, information retrieval, or knowledge management.
• Experience working directly with users or clients in any capacity.
• Contributions to open-source projects.

Why Join

You'll work on genuinely hard problems at the intersection of AI, search, and product design. You'll have direct impact on how major organisations use AI for knowledge work. Every client is a new domain to crack. The team is small, technical, and moves fast.

If you want to design and build the solutions layer for AI search, reach out: careers@valyu.ai