Design Engineer (Intern)

Substrate builds financial infrastructure for equipment financing a $1.3T market that still runs on manual approvals and paper. We give equipment vendors an in-house-bank capability: AI-powered underwriting capital-as-a-service and point-of-sale integrations. Our customers range from construction auctioneers and CNC distributors to robotics startups. We are a team of 10 from Ramp SpaceX and Anthropic backed by a $7M seed from Floodgate Ironspring Neo and Steel Atlas.

Were hiring a Design Engineering Intern to help make Substrates products look and feel insanely great. Youll work at the intersection of design product copywriting and full-stack engineering shipping 01 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. Youll 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 technical complexity of our product and the high degree of ownership we trust interns with weve found engineers typically take 6-8 weeks to fully onboard and lead their own projects. Therefore we require candidates who can commit to an internship for at least 8 months. We occasionally make exceptions for those who are truly exceptional.

• 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 dont 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.

• Own the full arc from customer problem to UI/UX design to prototype to shipped product starting with the buyer financing application the vendor dashboard and our internal operations console.

• Build and extend Substrates design system: components tokens and patterns and decide when to extend a shared component add a pattern or use a one-off.

• Build interfaces in React 19 and TypeScript (Vite Tailwind TanStack Query) on top of complex legacy-heavy underlying systems covering responsive behavior state handling and accessibility.

• Write product and funnel copy and iterate against funnel and drop-off analytics instrumented on every user flow.

• Implement basic backend changes yourself such as adding fields and entities and modifying database schemas (Prisma migrations and the NestJS endpoints behind your screens).

• Build and improve agentic workflows for design and front-end development.

• Experience shipping production web interfaces.

• A portfolio of shipped work you personally designed and built.

• You can explain a problem what you did and what changed after launch.

• Built or extended a design system.

• Can critique a screen for hierarchy comprehension interaction accessibility and edge cases.

• Can make basic backend changes (schema changes new fields) and are willing to learn more.

• Demonstrated clear writing such as shown in the portfolio itself.

• is something youd enjoy reading

• You love experimenting with tools like Mobbin and Figr

• You resonate with our engineering philosophy

• Rapid prototyping in Figma or code

• Agentic workflows for design and front-end development

• Growth or conversion copywriting

• Fintech or other regulated-product UX

If you are interested please apply via Dover AND email and with answers to the following (less than 3 sentences each):

• If you could have one persons career arc who would it be and why

• Whats the most insanely great thing youve ever designed Include a link or video so we can see!

• Link to Linkedin Github personal page or anything relevant about you online.

• Resume (PDF)

• We require a minimum internship duration of 8 months. Please confirm your intended start date and internship length.

• We are headquartered in San Francisco and you are welcome to work with us in-person however this is not a requirement and you may work fully remote. Please share your intended work location time zone you would work from and confirm if you can overlap with at least 6 hours within 8am-5pm Pacific Time.

Required Experience:

Intern