AI Design Engineer

We're building toward a future where every customer interaction with vision care is seamless, informed, and genuinely personal. Our design and product teams are early in building the systems that make that possible, and AI is core to how we're getting there.

The CX Incubator exists to rapidly build and test new concepts for our mobile app before larger investments are made. We're looking for a hands-on Applied AI Design Engineer who combines strong frontend/mobile software engineering, applied AI experience, and strong product and design instincts to turn ambitious customer experience ideas into functional, testable prototypes.

You'll work alongside a marketer and designer to take concepts from ideation to realistic, testable simulations and prototypes. This is an engineering role at its core: you'll write code and build functional customer-facing experiences, applying and integrating AI technologies including conversational AI, content decisioning, recommendations, personalization, generative experiences, and voice interactions.

You'll also use AI-native development tools and workflows to move quickly from idea to working simulations and prototypes. This role isn't simply about using AI to code faster; it's about understanding, evaluating, and applying AI technologies to solve real customer problems and independently figuring out how to turn early concepts into working POCs. The goal is to prove out the experience and the technology behind it through functional prototypes—not to build the final production-ready solution.

This is a role for a builder who is comfortable with ambiguity, enjoys creating working solutions quickly, and learns through experimentation.

What you’ll do

Turn ideas, customer problems, and hypotheses into functional, testable prototypes, starting with our mobile app.

Build AI-powered frontend and mobile experiences using LLMs, AI/ML services, APIs, customer and product data, and modern web and mobile app technologies.

Research, evaluate, and prototype with AI models, services, and capabilities to determine the right approach for customer use cases such as content and intelligent decisioning, recommendations, personalization, generative content, conversational AI, and voice experiences.

Independently determine the technical approach needed to take loosely defined AI-powered concepts from idea to a functional, testable POC.

Create realistic customer simulations that can be tested with internal and external audiences.

Explore how to ground, guide, and evaluate AI experiences using customer profile data, customer context, and human-defined guardrails.

Connect prototypes to content libraries, AI SDKs, and staging systems.

Contribute reusable AI and application capabilities to our prototyping platform.

Use AI-native development workflows with tools like Cursor, Claude, Copilot, and similar technologies.

Help define practical guardrails for safe, reliable, and brand-appropriate customer-facing AI experiences.

Use feedback from user and customer testing to iterate on prototypes and explore new approaches.

What you'll need

Strong frontend or mobile software engineering skills and the ability to write code independently, with experience building web or native mobile applications using React, Angular, or similar frameworks. Experience with iOS development is a plus.

Hands-on experience integrating and applying AI technologies, models, or services within applications, prototypes, or customer experiences.

Experience working with applied AI technologies such as LLMs, conversational AI, recommendation or decisioning systems, personalization, retrieval/grounding, agents, or generative AI.

Demonstrated ability to independently take an ambiguous AI-powered concept, determine how to build it, and deliver a functional POC or prototype.

Experience integrating APIs, cloud services, data sources, and external systems.

Familiarity with AI-native development tools such as Cursor, Claude, Copilot, or similar technologies.

Strong product and design instincts and an appreciation for great customer experiences.

Comfort with ambiguity and rapid iteration.

Experience incorporating user or customer feedback into prototypes and iterating based on what you learn.

Portfolio, prototypes, side projects, or examples that demonstrate curiosity and self-directed building.