Description
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 tools like Mobbin and Figr
* growth.design [http://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 [https://substrate-industries.notion.site/product-engineering?source=copy_link]
NEXT STEPS
If you are interested, please apply via Dover AND email kelvin@joinsubstrate.com [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!
* Confirm your availability for an 8+ month internship
* Availability for a 30min call