Founding Design Engineer

About this role

This founding design engineer role will be one of first three hires, and we’re in the process of setting up an office in NYC. This role is 100% in-person, and we only plan on hiring people who are so smart/amicable that you’d go into the office on a Sunday just to hangout with them.

We’re looking for somebody who is obsessed with design and loves bringing those designs to life with code. If you’re an exceptionally talented designer but don’t code, that could still work if you’re willing to learn (we’re more than happy to teach you frontend development — it’s not that hard!). Aptitude is more important than experience, in our view.

In this role, your sole responsibility will be to design and help build the most beautiful reading app in the world.

We share the view of Stripe founder Patrick Collison when he said:

“f Stripe is a monstrously successful business, but what we make isn’t beautiful, and Stripe doesn’t embody a culture of incredibly exacting craftsmanship, I’ll be much less happy. I think the returns to both of those things in the world are really high. I think even beyond the pecuniary or financial returns, the world’s just uglier than it needs to be… One can do things well or poorly, and beauty is not a rivalrous good.

Working at Perch is a rare opportunity to work on a consumer product that everyone in the world can use. For example, one user shared it with her 60-year-old mom who loves reading Anthony Pompliano’s Substack 😂. And it’s not just that everyone can use it, but everyone should use it.

1+ years of experience

in product design

Salary

$150k - $200k

Equity

1%-2%

Visa sponsorship not available

On-site work policy

In-person in NYC

Full-time position

This is a full time, W-2 role

Location

New York, NY

About Perch

Perch is the first reading app for the Internet — all of your blogs and newsletters in one place. As more writing moves online, we believe this will comprise an increasingly larger percentage of all reading activity, and over time, we will be the #1 reading application/product in the world.

We (Mike & Matt) also believe that removing friction from the reading experience will expand the market for blogs and newsletters from mostly chronically online people today (where do you find blogs/newsletters if you’re not on X or Reddit?) to the 5+ billion people connected to the Internet.

Specifically, we’re focused on removing three key layers of friction:

1. Cost. Writing is shockingly expensive. Twenty dollars for a book or a ten dollar monthly subscription is out of reach for most people. Perch will make it free. Lots of great writers already publish their content online for free, so we'll start with those. Then, once we've hit the scale required to support tasteful advertising, we'll share the majority of that revenue with writers to attract writing that currently sits behind paywalls. YouTube demonstrates how effective this model can be: it'd be silly for MrBeast to paywall his videos today.

2. Discovery. Writing is scattered across millions of websites, newspapers, magazines, and books. Perch will index it all and show you exactly what you want to read, before you even knew you wanted to read it.

3. Ease of use. Highlighting, picking up where you left off, audio, summarizing, themes, fonts, adjustable text sizes, and bookmarking should all be seamless. And if your grandma can't figure out how to do it, it's too hard!

But don’t take our word for it, try the app for yourself here.

A few dozen people are already using it almost every day even though we just released it to the app store a few weeks ago and have done very little to promote it. Our sole focus right now is getting the product to organic exponential growth solely via word of mouth. Some people are sharing it with friends already, but it’s not quite there yet.

One more thing

We built this blog called the Startup Archive that has hundreds of thousands of followers across Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Threads, and newsletter.

It began as a way to dogfood our product and put ourselves in the shoes of people who write on line, but it has grown into this incredible distribution asset that can help share Perch with the millions of people it reaches per month.

We haven’t promoted Perch yet though. We’re waiting until the product is good enough to grow organically through word of mouth before pouring gasoline on it.

About the team

We’ve also raised $6M from some of the best VCs in the world — Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian’s 776 Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, and a few other angels.

For more on why we think building Perch is important, read our mission statement.

Role responsibilities

Design the most beautiful reading app in the world

Frontend engineering to help bring those designs to life (preferred but not required)

Tech stack

Figma, React Native, Typescript

Interview process

1 Intro Call with CEO (30 minutes)

2 Design Review with CEO (1 Hour)

3 On-Site Interview (Two Days)