Design Engineer

About Dakota

Dakota Prep is building the future of skilled trades education. We create modern, AI-powered tools that help electricians, plumbers, and other tradespeople learn the trade, pass licensing exams, renew their licenses, earn certifications, and move forward in their careers.

So far, we've supported more than 20,000 learners across 80+ schools, unions, and training programs in the U.S. and Canada. We work directly with individual students and with the institutions that train them.

Our newest product is Dakota Labs. You can't learn a trade from a textbook. You learn it by doing the work, getting it wrong, and figuring out why. But physical labs are expensive, bench time is limited, and most apprentices only get a few reps before they're expected to do it for real. Dakota Labs is a simulator where apprentices wire, install and troubleshoot real circuits from any browser, as often as they want. We think every tradesperson should get the reps they need, wherever they are, and Labs is how we get there.

The role

We're hiring a design engineer with real product instincts. You'll own features end to end. Figure out what instructors and apprentices need, design it, and build it. This isn't a ticket-taking role. New programs are signing on and every one brings new labs, new curriculum needs and a lot of feedback. You'll work directly with me and with customers, and you'll make product calls without waiting on a spec.

Product and design come first. But you ship. You'll build full features with AI coding tools, and our engineer reviews every PR and owns the simulator engine and core infrastructure. You don't need to be a senior engineer. You do need to ship working code every week.

What you'll work on:

• The simulator experience. How apprentices wire, install and troubleshoot on the canvas. You design it and you build it.

• The lab authoring tool. Instructors build their own labs. It should be simple enough that a training director can do it without calling us.

• Instructor and program features. Assignments, rosters, progress tracking and reporting that fit how apprenticeship programs actually run.

• Our licensing prep apps. Electrical and plumbing exam prep used by 20,000+ learners. You'll improve them and help them grow.

• New products. We're building more tools for the trades. You'll help shape them and ship the first versions.

• Customer research. Sit in on demos and onboarding calls. Watch how people use the product. Decide what we build next.

• Our design language. Own the UI system so everything stays consistent across products.

What we're looking for

• A portfolio of product work you designed and shipped. Show us how you decided what to build, not just the final screens.

• Strong interaction design, especially complex interactive UI (canvas, editors, drag-and-drop).

• You ship production code. You're comfortable using AI tools to build full features, frontend and backend, and getting them through code review.

• Good product judgment. You can talk to a user, find the real problem and cut scope to ship.

• Clear writing. You'll work closely with me, sales and customers.

• Respect for people who work with their hands. You don't need trade experience, but you need to want to learn the domain.

Nice to have

• Experience as a product designer or in a founding design role

• A trade background, or family in the trades

• Edtech or B2B products sold to training orgs

• Experience designing authoring or content creation tools

• Comfort with product analytics and simple experiments