Design Engineer

Who We Need

We're looking for a Design Engineer to help define what great product craft feels like at Rillet.

We're looking for a Design Engineer who sits at the intersection of design and engineering—someone who cares as much about pixel-perfect details as about clean, performant code. This isn't a role where design hands off to engineering. You'll own the full arc from visual concept to shipped product.

You'll be a key contributor to Rillet's platform refresh—evolving our design language, building out our design system, and translating brand direction into a cohesive product experience. You'll work closely with our product designer and engineering team, and you'll be trusted to make independent design decisions.

The best person for this role has unusually high taste and unusually high curiosity. You care about the web as a medium. You study products, interfaces, motion, tools, and patterns because you cannot help yourself. You are excited by the possibility that financial software can feel fast, elegant, precise, and alive.

What You'll Do

• Drive Rillet's platform refresh across core surfaces like the launchpad, side nav, login, navigation patterns, empty states, tables, workflows, and other high-frequency product experiences.

• Turn rough ideas into shipped product. You may start from a loose Figma exploration, a customer problem, a brand direction, or a half-formed product intuition—and bring it all the way to polished, production-ready UI.

• Build and evolve Rillet's design system: tokens, components, interaction patterns, motion principles, layout primitives, documentation, and the implementation details that make product-wide changes fast and reliable.

• Translate our upcoming brand refresh into the product quickly and thoughtfully, making sure the platform feels cohesive rather than "reskinned."

• Raise the bar for product quality across visual design, interaction design, accessibility, responsiveness, performance, and micro-details.

• Prototype in code when Figma is too slow or too static, especially for motion, interaction, responsiveness, keyboard behavior, AI workflows, and complex financial surfaces.

• Identify design-to-code workflows that should be automated, systematized, or agentized. Help build the context, components, and patterns that make AI-assisted product development faster and more brand-consistent.

• Partner with product designers, engineers, and founders to shape the experience—not just implement it. You'll be expected to bring opinions, taste, and alternatives.

• Notice what's off before anyone asks. Then fix it.

Who We're Looking For

• Exceptional taste. You can tell when something is almost right but not quite—and you know how to make it better.

• Deep curiosity. You are constantly exploring new products, tools, interaction patterns, AI workflows, visual systems, and ways of building on the web.

• You genuinely enjoy both design and engineering, and you do not see them as separate phases of the work.

• Strong product instincts. You can reason from customer needs to interface decisions, not just from mockups to implementation.

• Frontend fluency. You understand how modern web interfaces are built and can write clean, performant production code. React experience is preferred; Svelte is a bonus.

• Comfort working from ambiguity. You do not need every requirement spelled out. You can take an open-ended product area, form a point of view, prototype options, get feedback, and ship.

• Systems thinking. You care about reusable primitives, scalable patterns, design tokens, component APIs, and the difference between a one-off fix and a foundation.

• High craft in the details: spacing, type, hierarchy, motion, affordances, loading states, empty states, keyboard behavior, accessibility, and performance.

• A portfolio or body of work that shows strong visual judgment, interaction sensibility, and the ability to move between design exploration and production execution.

• Comfort using AI tools to move faster, prototype more broadly, and automate repetitive parts of the design-engineering workflow—without outsourcing taste.

• A bias toward shipping. You can move quickly without lowering the bar.