Work-sample challenge
Design Engineer, AI Capability Development
A 60-minute simulation where you prototype an AI-powered capability-growth feature for a research-embedded product team — from undefined research insight to working prototype and technical strategy.
The brief
You've just joined Cognify as the sole Design Engineer on Capability Lab — a small research-embedded team inside a 35-person Series A startup building an AI-powered learning platform. Cognify's thesis is simple and hard: software should grow what users can do, not how long they stay. The Capability Lab team exists to prove that thesis with shipped product. It's your second week. The research team just wrapped a study on how users learn with AI tutors, and the findings are sitting in a doc that nobody has turned into a prototype yet. Product and Design have opinions. Engineering doesn't have a roadmap. You've been asked to come to Friday's cross-functional sync with a working prototype and a proposed technical direction — something real enough to anchor a conversation, not a deck of ideas.
Your setup
You are the Design Engineer on Capability Lab. You have access to the research findings, a dashboard showing current product metrics, and a few notes from the last team sync. You can message your teammates — Priya (Research), Dev (Product), and Soren (Frontend, platform team) — to pressure-test ideas, pull missing context, or align on direction. Your job is to produce a working interactive prototype of a new AI-powered learning interaction and a technical strategy memo explaining your architectural decisions and the patterns you want to establish for the team. You have 90 minutes.
What you'd deliver
- 01
Interactive Prototype
VisualA working HTML prototype of the AI-powered retrieval+generation learning interaction — including the attempt invitation, the correction moment, and the delta visualization — polished enough to demo and interact with at Friday's sync.
- 02
Technical Strategy Memo
DocA written memo proposing the architectural approach, the component patterns you're establishing for Capability Lab, and how this prototype's patterns could be absorbed by the broader platform team.
- 03
Interaction Design Rationale
DocA concise document explaining the key interaction design decisions — what you built, what you deliberately left out, and how each choice addresses a specific finding from the research or a user behavior pattern.
This is an example of a Levvy challenge.
Levvy turns a job description into a few hours of real work inside a simulated company — colleagues to consult, material to dig through, deliverables to ship. Candidates are understood by how they work, not a résumé.
See how Levvy works →