Design Engineer, Contract

Ambrook helps American family-run businesses become more profitable and resilient.

From volatile markets to climate shifts, independent operators face mounting pressure. While sustainable investments often yield the best long-term returns, they require financial clarity and capital that fragmented legacy systems can’t provide.

We are rebuilding the financial infrastructure that independent operators rely on. By replacing paperwork with modern tools for accounting, banking, and spending, Ambrook gives owners the data they need to prove viability to lenders and the next generation. We empower the stewards of land and labor to make confident investments in their future.

We’re a Series A startup backed by Thrive Capital, Dylan Field, and Homebrew. We’re looking for early team members to help us untangle the intersection of American industry, climate, and the economy.

The opportunity

Ambrook is building a world-class team that values design and craft. Joining a strong founding team of designers and engineers, you’ll help drive our technical decisions and influence our product direction for years to come, with the goal of making agricultural and industrial businesses more resilient and profitable. Read here to hear more from our co-founder Dan about this role and what we’re looking for in a candidate.

This role is overlapping with our full-time Design Engineer position, but this contract is also open to part-time / freelance arrangements and US-based or international talent. There is a lot of great work to go around!

​​You'll own

• Product craft: Beautiful, performant interfaces that solve real problems for agricultural operators

• Design systems: Component libraries, interaction patterns, and design tokens that enable consistent experiences

• User experience: Translating complex financial workflows into intuitive, accessible interfaces

• Technical implementation: High-quality frontend code that brings designs to life

Responsibilities

• Grow our design system — Build and evolve component libraries, interaction patterns, and design tokens that work seamlessly across web and mobile platforms

• Ship beautiful, functional experiences — Design and build user-facing features from concept to production, translating complex agricultural finance workflows into interfaces that feel natural for ranchers and farmers

• Champion product craft — Establish quality standards and processes that ensure every feature we ship solves real problems elegantly

• Scale our frontend architecture — Contribute to improving design system infrastructure, development workflows, and tooling as we grow

• Collaborate across disciplines — Work with design on visual standards, product on feature requirements, and engineering on technical architecture

About you

• 3+ years building high-quality web and mobile experiences

• Design system ownership: You've built or worked extensively with component libraries and understand both the technical and human challenges

• Strong design instincts: You can spot when something feels off in a UI and create high-fidelity prototypes in Figma

• Advanced frontend skills: Clean, performant code with solid grasp of data structures, async programming, and modern development workflows

• Mission-driven: Excited to solve real problems for people who work the land and help family-run businesses become more profitable and resilient

• Comfortable with ambiguity: You thrive when balancing user needs, business requirements, and technical constraints to create elegant solutions

• Collaborative by nature: Sitting at the center of design and engineering, you work well across disciplines to get things done

• Bonus: Experience at fast-moving startups, building financial products, or working with React, TypeScript, React Native, and Next.js

Our Tech Stack

• Frontend: Next.js / React application written in TypeScript

• Mobile: React Native & Expo for iOS and Android

• Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform

• Data: Firestore & Google Cloud SQL for storage, BigQuery for analytics

• Design: Figma for design, custom component library for implementation

Benefits

For employee benefits, see the full-time version of this role.

Our values

• Reach Understanding – We are driven by curiosity and empathy to learn about our customers, team, and world.

• Real Talk – We create space for ourselves and others to be straightforward, vulnerable, and accountable.

• Be Proactively Resourceful – We are internally motivated and externally empowered to identify opportunities and solve problems.

• Derisk Thoughtfully – We lean into the biggest risks we face as a company and put in the work to address them systematically.

• Find the Positive-Sum – We believe in creating incentive structures that align the needs of our company, our customers, and our planet.