Senior Design Engineer

Mission

Every consumer on earth purchases in one of three places: online, big-box retail, or mom-and-pop shops. Paradoxically, the largest commercial channel is, by far, humble traditional trade shops. Yet they remain fragmented, offline, and opaque.

Native is the first intelligence-grade system built to penetrate this opacity. Each analog store is digitized into a dynamic graph where noise is filtered into low latency signals, transforming the antiquated offline world into advanced digital intelligence. Commercial leaders gain the precision to see what others cannot, store by store, rendering decisive decision advantage to win the market.

Join the ground floor of the only platform engineered to decode the analog economy into operational dominance.

Talent Values

• High Leverage: Consistent ability to attain the productive capacity of 5-10 people through grit, raw talent, and sheer force of will.
• High Agency: Relentless sense of ownership in the outcome, regardless of circumstance, acting decisively to shape the environment rather than being shaped by it.
• Curiosity With Discipline: An evidence seeking, measurement mindset without succumbing to analysis paralysis, and a penchant for experimentation.
• Intellectual Honesty: Certain enough to act, humble enough to always be learning.

Context

• Native is hiring a Senior Design Engineer to design, build, and maintain the many surfaces where a person encounters Native: the public website and the internal tools the company runs on. This is deliberately not a front-end role implementing someone else’s designs, and it is not a webmaster maintaining a site an agency built. We are hiring one person who is both the designer and the engineer, and who owns outcomes end to end.
• Native sells intelligence-grade software to sophisticated enterprise buyers. The surfaces have to look like it. Raising Native’s public web presence and internal product surfaces to the standard of the underlying technology is the mandate of this role.
• The multiplier is AI. Native builds with coding agents as a matter of course, and this role only makes sense for someone who does the same. We expect one person to ship what a conventional team would ship, at a higher craft bar. Candidates who use AI as autocomplete are not the profile; candidates who have restructured how they work around agents are.
• The role sits in the marketing organization but is a technical role held to the standards of Native’s core engineering team. There is no design team to hand off to and no front-end team to delegate to. The mandate is leverage: one first-rate design engineer instead of a web team, an agency, and an internal tools team. This is a senior individual contributor role. It carries ownership, not headcount.

Responsibilities

• Own the Public Web Presence: Design, build, ship, and measure Native’s website end to end: product story, launch pages, campaign sites, careers. Own performance, accessibility, SEO, and the analytics instrumentation that makes web performance legible to marketing. The site is a product, not a brochure, and it is never handed to an agency.
• Own Internal Product Surfaces: Design and build the internal applications the company runs on, and take them from working tools to production-grade products: real interaction design, real information architecture, access control, error and empty states, observability, and maintainability. These should feel like the best software the company uses.
• Build and Own the Brand OS: Turn the Native brand into a working system rather than a folder of files. One GitHub repo holding the type, color, spacing, motion, components, templates, and the rules for how Native looks and sounds, built in a tokenized fashion so that a person or an agent can produce on-brand work without a designer in the loop. Native’s product is a graph; data visualization is a first-class part of this system, not an afterthought.
• Set and Hold the Craft Bar: Be the person in the company who will not ship something ugly. Typography, motion, density, responsive behavior, load performance, and the thousand details that separate a site people remember from a site people forget.
• Ship to Engineering Standards and Partner Across Teams: Version control, code review, CI, observability, and documentation, building systems others can operate and extend. Translate what marketing, product, and leadership need into shipped surfaces, working with core engineering on platform standards.

Requirements

• Design and Engineering in One Person: Demonstrated, portfolio-backed ability to both design and build production web software at a high craft bar. This is the non-negotiable requirement. We are not looking for a front-end engineer who takes direction from a designer, and we are not looking for a designer who prototypes and hands off. We need a portfolio we would be proud of and a repository we would merge.
• Marketing-Grade Web Craft: Has personally shipped public-facing sites with considered typography, purposeful motion, deliberate art direction, and performance that survives an audit. Agency or design studio pedigree is a strong signal.
• Product-Grade Application Craft: Has shipped data-dense B2B or internal applications, including dashboards, tables, filters, permissions, and workflows, where the hard part is information design rather than decoration. Both halves of this requirement are mandatory; most candidates will have only one.
• AI-Native Development and Harness Engineering: Daily, production-level use of AI coding agents, and the ability to build the harness around them: the tools, context, prompts, guardrails, and evaluation loops that make an agent reliable at a specific job. Must be able to explain concretely what they now delegate, where agents fail, and how they hold quality at agent speed.
• Modern Stack Command: TypeScript, React, Next.js, Three.js, modern CSS, edge deployment, a motion library, and structured content. Has authored or materially owned a design system used by other people.
• Execution Under Ambiguity: Comfortable being the only person who does this job. Takes a vague business need and returns a shipped surface without a spec, a designer, a PM, or QA in between. Chooses what to build as much as how.

Preferred Qualifications

• Agency or design studio pedigree combined with in-house product experience: award-caliber client work, followed by living with software after launch.
• A public record of craft, such as A FWA or CSS Design Awards recognition, a widely seen personal site, or a well-regarded open-source UI project.
• Experience as a founding or first design engineer, where the job was to establish the bar rather than inherit it.
• 3D and WebGL experience, and data-visualization depth built from real data rather than component-library defaults.
• Experience building internal tools on top of third-party SaaS APIs, where an external system is the source of truth and the tool is the interface.

Company

Native is a focused spinout backed by Vista, a $100B fund backing leaders in Artificial Intelligence and advanced technologies. Its mandate is to build the first intelligence-grade system for the world’s largest and least-understood channel of trade. It’s doing this by reverse-engineering analog markets into a digital graph, delivering precision, clarity, and control at enterprise scale. It is headquartered in New York City, with offices in Mexico City and Bogotá.

Location

• Cape Town
• Ciudad de México