Founding Design Engineer

About the role

About us

Garage powers the exchange of critical assets across America’s essential industries. We started with fire departments, where purchasing mission-critical vehicles and equipment used to take months of paperwork, phone calls, and delays. Our agentic platform automates the entire transaction: discovery, payments, freight, paperwork, warranty, and financing. What once took months now takes minutes.

In under a year, we’ve expanded to cities and towns in all 50 states and grown revenue more than 10x. Based in New York, we’ve raised $18M from Y Combinator, Initialized Capital, Infinity Ventures, FJ Labs, and other leading investors. We’re moving fast, growing quickly, and just getting started.

About the role

Good design is a core feature of our platform. When people are looking to buy and sell assets that are valued as much as an actual house, it’s important the product experience is clean, smooth, and intuitive. Since the beginning, we’ve been very intentional about maintaining a high bar for product design.

We love going into the details, talking to our customers, and building the pixels nobody asked for but always wanted. You’ll join a small team working directly with the Co-founder and CTO.

- Build and ship polished, production-quality UI across our core products (including a mobile app).

- Craft UI details including layouts, typography, responsiveness, motion, and micro-interactions using Tailwind CSS.

- Contribute to shared UI foundations including components, patterns, and design tokens.

- Work across the stack using React, Next.js, and TypeScript to deliver fast, reliable interfaces.

- Optimize for performance, accessibility, and maintainability without compromising on design.

- Raise the bar for frontend craft through code reviews, critiques, and shared standards.

What we’re looking for

- Strong eye for design and interaction with taste you can both defend and implement.

- Comfort working across design, product, and engineering to ship work.

- You think in systems, not tickets.

- You get excited by operating in a high-performance startup environment.

- You would love to be customer-facing.

- You play for the front of the jersey, having strong opinions, a willingness to question the status quo, and a drive to become a real expert in whatever space you work in. All while being a great team communicator.

Required

- Strong experience with React, Next.js, Tailwind, and TypeScript in production environments.

- Exceptional CSS skills with a proven ability to build pixel-perfect, resilient user interfaces.

- Portfolio that demonstrates high-craft frontend or design engineering work.

Nice to have

- Startup experience as a technical co-founder or early engineer at a Series A/B/C startup.

- 4+ years of experience.

Our values

- Growth oriented. We invest in people who grow as the company grows. We all should be constantly learning.

- Humility. Everyone has a lot to give and a lot to learn. We believe in creating an environment where the best ideas win and acknowledging when we are wrong.

- Customer focused. We have a genuine love for our customers. Customer success is our success.

- Hack to success. We move fast and take big swings. We always aim for a solution that addresses 80% of the problem in 20% of the time. We make informed bets, launch quickly, and iterate.

Why Garage?

- Our product is something people use everyday to buy the equipment local communities everywhere depend on.

- We’ve grown revenue over 10x in the last year and are well capitalized with $18M in funding raised total.

- We have a talent-dense, high-performing team from Ramp, Twitter, Goldman Sachs, Bilt, Wise, Unify, Honey, PayPal, and more.

- You’ll be one of our first 35 employees, operating as a foundational member of the team, partnering alongside the company’s founders.

What we offer

- Competitive salary and stock options

- Health, dental and vision insurance (100% covered)

- Unlimited paid time off every year (in addition to company observed holidays)

- Daily lunch and dinner

- $100 monthly wellness stipend

- 401(k) with employer match

- Pre-tax commuter benefits

- Bi-annual team offsite

- Relocation assistance