Overview

Founded: 2025
Website: https://tightrope.dev
Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid - 4 days a week in-office Mon-Thurs)
Funding: $7M total from Amplify Partners (first check in Modal, Langchain, Hightouch)
Tech Stack: Python + React

Mission & Vision

Integrations are one of the biggest, unsolved challenges of widespread AI adoption. If an agent can't connect to the systems humans use every day, it's just a demo. AI is only as good as the context it has.

For decades, integrating software meant waiting for websites to build open APIs. Most never built them - they didn’t need to, wanted to keep things closed, or never evolved fast enough. But every one of those websites has a UI.

We believe the browser is the universal integration layer. Any system a human can access, an agent should be able to access too. No more manually logging in, filling out forms, or pulling reports.

For engineers, this enables a full 360° connective layer to every tool your users work with. Not just the vendors with clean APIs. All of them. Data and actions that were previously trapped behind portals and performed manually, now are now programmable.

Making this possible means solving for the complexity that shows up in the real world: every auth method, type of workflow, errors, and UI changes across millions of systems. That’s what we’re building at Tightrope – AI-powered infrastructure to make browser automation safe, reliable, and shippable.

Leadership & Team

Tightrope is led by a founding team with over a decade of combined experience building B2B integration & authentication infrastructure.

• Tara Pichumani — Co-Founder & CEO
  Former Head of Platform at Merge. Launched 7 unified API products and 250+ partner integrations that grew from 0 → $13M ARR in two years.

• Alex Zaldastani — Co-Founder & CTO
  Founding engineer and engineering leader at Stytch. Built core auth APIs that scaled to millions of users. Prior roles at Coinbase.

• Jumar Martin — Founding Engineer
  Early engineer at Aleph. Built the mapping infrastructure for autonomous vehicles at Cruise.

We value great communicators, people who love their craft, strong owners. Care deeply, challenge directly. Do your best work, the way you work best.

Everyone engages directly with customers and ships daily. You’ll be actively shaping the product, the team, and the company.

Core Design Challenges

We are looking for a UX-leaning Product Designer who is obsessed with user journeys and complex product thinking. In this role, you won’t just hand off Figma files; you will be an active builder, leveraging modern AI tools to implement and iterate on your work. You will take strong ownership of our core product surfaces, translating highly technical concepts into seamless, intuitive user experiences. You will:

• Design and optimize complex UX flows, including user onboarding, browser extension handoffs, and the broader customer lifecycle.

• Drive the direction of our dashboard and maintain a scalable component library/design system.

• Design intuitive interfaces for complex features, including automation visualization, versioning, documentation, and ROI surfaces.

Who We Build For

Companies built today have a once in a generation opportunity to build AI that automates manual work in almost every industry.

The biggest opportunities are where data access is hardest — regulated environments, legacy systems, workflows that are locked behind logins.

Today, the verticals we see demand from are:

• Healthcare & Insurance — carrier portals, clearinghouses, EHRs, prior auth

• Logistics & Supply Chain — customs systems, carrier portals, retail supplier invoicing

• Financial Services — payroll, accounting tools, cap tables, compliance reporting

• Biotech & Research — genome browsers, legacy research databases

The verticals we can serve are endless —but they're all rooted in the same problem: secure, bidirectional data access via the browser, the universal integration layer.

We knew that Tightrope needed to be built for complex & sensitive data environments from the start. Human-in-the-loop controls for sensitive automations. Full observability and audit trails for compliance. SOC 2 Type 2 certified, with HIPAA and GDPR support built in.

Developers building context-aware AI agents all need the same thing: secure access to customer UIs to unlock data previously out of reach, with reliable execution & the ability to ship with confidence. That's what we provide.

Join the Founding Team

You'll be the first Product Designer on the team—high ownership, high impact.

Browser automation is inherently fragile. Portals have weird auth, UIs change constantly, and nothing works the same way twice. You'll build the design that is intuitive.

• You are comfortable using AI coding tools (like Cursor or Claude) to help implement and iterate on your designs. You don't need to be a deep front-end engineer, but you must be able to execute and bring your designs to life.

• You understand how to apply the 80/20 rule. You prioritize ruthlessly, balance quality with speed, and ship fast.

Who You Are

You're curious about what it's like to build a company from scratch—how decisions get made, how to invest in foundations while still moving fast. You want exposure to product, infrastructure, customer calls, and hiring all at once.

You're a strong product-minded designer. You've built designs from 0 to 1. You prioritize ruthlessly, balance quality with speed, and ship fast.

We work in-person 4 days/week in SF, with competitive comp & equity to match.