Staff Designer (Rapid Prototyping)

Thunderbird is expanding beyond email with Thunderbolt, an open-source AI client designed for organizations that need more control over their data, infrastructure, and model choices

We’re looking for a Staff Designer to help shape the product experience for Thunderbolt as it moves from early product development into enterprise use cases. This role sits at the intersection of product design, front-end engineering, prototyping, and AI-assisted product development

You’ll turn early product ideas, user needs, partner feedback, and workflow concepts into working prototypes and production-ready user experiences. This is not a role focused only on mockups or design artifacts. You’ll work directly in the codebase, use AI-assisted development tools thoughtfully, and help define the interaction patterns that make Thunderbolt intuitive, useful, trustworthy, and enterprise-ready

You should be comfortable operating independently in ambiguity, moving quickly from concept to prototype, distinguishing between experiments and production-ready work, and creating reusable product and interaction patterns that help the broader team move faster

• Build functional prototypes and product experiments directly in the Thunderbolt codebase
• Translate ambiguous product ideas, user workflows, partner feedback, and enterprise needs into clear, usable product experiences
• Help define interaction patterns for AI-powered chat, search, research, workflow automation, knowledge retrieval, and enterprise administration
• Use AI-assisted development tools to accelerate prototyping and implementation while maintaining strong judgment around quality, usability, security, accessibility, and maintainability
• Partner closely with product, design, engineering, and enterprise-facing teams to explore, validate, and refine product direction
• Contribute production-quality front-end code where appropriate
• Identify when a prototype should be discarded, refined, generalized, or productionized
• Improve the usability, accessibility, consistency, and polish of the Thunderbolt user experience
• Help develop reusable components, interface patterns, or design-system elements that create leverage for the broader product team
• Bring a user-centered perspective to technical and product discussions, especially where AI behavior, user trust, transparency, permissions, or workflow clarity are important
• Consider enterprise needs when designing product experiences, including data sensitivity, user control, administrative visibility, auditability, and security expectations
• Contribute to a product culture that values speed, clarity, experimentation, maintainability, responsible AI use, and thoughtful user experience

What success looks like:

In this role, you will help Thunderbolt move from ideas and early workflows into clear, usable, high-quality product experiences. You’ll create prototypes that clarify direction, reusable patterns that help the team move faster, and production experiences that make AI-powered workflows easier to understand and trust

A successful Staff Design Engineer will help the team decide what is worth building, what needs more testing, and what should not move forward. You’ll raise the quality of Thunderbolt’s user experience while helping the product remain fast-moving, practical, and enterprise-ready

Work environment

You’ll work with our passionate staff and open-source community members from all over the globe to support the mission and objectives of [REDACTED]. In this role, you’ll also collaborate closely with engineering, product, design, enterprise-facing teams, contractors, and external contributors working on Thunderbolt

Benefits

Health and wellness: [REDACTED] covers medical, dental and vision plan premiums at 100% for U.S. and Canadian employees. Our offerings give you the options you need to manage your health — and your family’s — the way you want.

Mental health: Mental health is as important as our physical health. That’s why [REDACTED]’s health benefits include therapy and coaching sessions to make sure our people have access to the care they need.

Time away: With all of life’s demands, time away from work to disconnect and recharge is essential. In addition to country-specific holidays (12 in the U.S. and Canada), vacation and sick time start accruing right away (specifics vary by country). Everyone also takes a pause together on quarterly all-company wellness days, plus you get to celebrate the most personal holiday of all: your birthday.

Parental leave: While [REDACTED]’s parental leave policies vary globally, our U.S. and Canadian-based employees can look forward to 26 weeks of paid leave for childbearing parents and 12 weeks of paid leave for non-childbearing parents.

Financial: [REDACTED] is a private company, so our compensation isn’t tied to stock options or equity plans. Instead, we offer generous, performance-based bonus plans to all regular employees to underscore that we share in our success as one team. As for retirement savings for US and Canadian employees, [REDACTED] contributes a percentage of your eligible base salary each year to the 401(k) Plan/RRSP (regardless of whether you contribute or not), with 100% vesting.

Learning and development: We’re big believers in learning by doing, and we also want to invest in your education and development beyond your role. Every employee is eligible for an annual professional development budget. [REDACTED] can put it toward technical or management training, certifications, conferences and more.

Help when you need it: Life is full of surprises; that’s why it’s important to be prepared. [REDACTED] provides Life/AD&D and Short and Long Term Disability insurance (offerings may vary by locale) to ensure that you and your family will have a safety net in place should you ever need it.

Plus a bit more: A few other benefits include a quarterly wellbeing stipend (to use on those things just for you), an employee referral bonus, internet reimbursement if you’re remote, and a budget for office essentials to make working remotely ergonomically comfortable.