Product Design Engineer — AI Interfaces (Design → React/TypeScript)

Role: Product Design Engineer — AI Interfaces (Design → React/TypeScript)

Comp: $180K-$220K + Equity

Location: New York or Washington, D.C

About the Company

A Defense Tech client is hiring a Product Design Engineer to own the design language and ship production UI for an agentic-AI platform that serves both non‑technical operators and advanced technical builders.

About the Role

The role pairs high-fidelity visual craft with hands‑on implementation in React and TypeScript and prioritizes accessible, legible interfaces for dense analytical workflows.

Responsibilities

• Create and steward a cross-audience design system and brand architecture that covers tokens, themes, light/dark parity, and shared component primitives, so operator and builder surfaces feel like one platform.
• Prototype and deliver novel AI interaction patterns such as streaming output, tool-call visualizations, citation and confidence surfacing, and agent‑to‑human handoffs.
• Translate product intent into production React and TypeScript, carrying sketches through to shipped features while preserving design fidelity.
• Design and maintain clear information hierarchies for dense analytical surfaces (knowledge graphs, evaluation dashboards, workflow visualizations) so important work is revealed rather than hidden.
• Treat accessibility and inclusive design (WCAG) as a baseline of the system rather than a later cleanup.

Qualifications

• Portfolio showing shipped production work where the candidate owned visual and technical execution.
• Hands‑on experience implementing and maintaining design tokens, theming, and component libraries in React + TypeScript.
• Proven ability to design information hierarchy for complex, dense UIs.
• U.S. citizenship and clearance eligibility.
• Based in the National Capital Region (NCR) or New York City.

Required Skills

• A designer‑engineer who lives at the intersection of visual design and front‑end code, with a portfolio demonstrating both visual expression and technical execution.
• Fluent across the design‑to‑code spectrum and experienced managing tokens, themes, and shared component primitives in a production React and TypeScript codebase.
• Experienced in shaping legibility in dense analytical domains (intelligence, financial, scientific, or developer‑facing products).
• Comfortable prototyping and shipping AI/LLM interface patterns (streaming displays, tool-call visualization, confidence/citation surfacing) and using AI-assisted prototyping where it accelerates delivery.
• Values accessibility and inclusive design as foundational.

Preferred Skills

• Prior work on AI and LLM interfaces: streaming output, tool-call visualization, citation surfacing, confidence indicators.
• Track record of using AI‑assisted tooling to close the gap between high‑fidelity design and production code.
• Experience collaborating with technical teams in high‑consequence or regulated environments.