Product Designer
Tetsuwan Scientific· startup· Research· Jun 3, 2026 · 5mo agoPosted 146 days ago
San Francisco, CA
In office
Full-time
Mid
$120K–$160K
3+ years exp
Before you apply
Ghost Signal:
Open since June 3, 2026 — 146 days, and still accepting applications.
Job description
ABOUT TETSUWAN SCIENTIFIC
Few fields touch human life as directly as biology does. But the pace of biological research is limited by how slowly and inconsistently experiments can be run by hand. We're building the infrastructure to make experimentation faster, more reproducible, and available to any scientist with questions worth asking.
For decades we've had incredible robotic tools capable of executing experiments without countless tiring hours of pipetting by hand and these instruments are more precise and accurate than manual methods. However, the engineering and validation time required for automating these machines means they are rarely used with the exception of the most repetitive, high throughput research tasks.
Our team has built a user-friendly editor and compiler that ingests a scientist's protocol description, converts it into a structured high-level format, and then automatically compiles it into executable code for these robots. See a demo here: tinyurl.com
We're a small team in San Francisco, currently raising our seed round and growing quickly. Joining now means shaping the product, the team, and the company at a stage where your decisions matter.
THE ROLE
You'll be the first dedicated product designer on the team, working alongside our current designer (who has been splitting design work with engineering), software engineers, automation engineers, and the founders. The right person will grow into owning design end-to-end.
Part of our philosophy is to surface every editable detail to the scientist, so they retain full control over how decisions are made from pdf protocol to code. This poses a major design challenge. Surfacing this level of control to the users while making the UI a pleasant experience means we need to design novel interfaces to communicate lab automation to scientists.
You will be tackling problems with few points of comparison, doing user research, shaping the information architecture, designing the interface, and watching real scientists use what you make.
QUALIFICATIONS
- You have 3+ years professional experience designing software products
- You can run a project end-to-end: research, sketches, prototypes, polished UI, and a clean handoff to engineers
- Fluency in Figma and adjacent tools
- You're comfortable with multi-discipline technical complexity. You should want to talk to our engineers and learn from our scientists
NICE TO HAVE
- Experience designing for the life sciences, lab workflows, or any technical domain where the user is an expert in something you're not.
- Familiarity with dev-tool or visual programming tools: projectional editors, node graph tools, program state visualization, errors and diagnostics.
- Startup or small-team experience, especially earlier stage.
- Familiarity with frontend work and the interplay between design and technical trade-offs
- A side practice — illustration, motion, printmaking, ceramics, anything that means you make things for the love of it.
LOGISTICS
- Location: San Francisco, in-person at our office in SoMa.
- Compensation: $120K – $160K · Offers Equity
- Process: intro call → portfolio review and design conversation → onsite with the team including a paid design exercise → references → offer.
Application prep
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Keywords to mirror
figma
- Platform
- ashby
- Effort
- quick