Design Engineer

Design Engineer

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Design Engineer based in United Kingdom.

This is a senior individual contributor role combining product design and production front-end engineering. You will own the core UI end to end, translating complex distributed-system behavior into interfaces developers can understand quickly. The work spans information design, data-intensive interfaces, performance, interaction, motion, and scalable design systems. You will work closely with engineers and the founding team, contributing directly to product direction and implementation. The role offers the opportunity to shape the developer experience of infrastructure used for demanding production and AI workloads. It is well suited to someone with strong design judgment, excellent coding skills, and the autonomy to take ideas from concept through deployment.

Accountabilities:

• Architect, design, and ship core product UI features from early concepts and whiteboarding through production-ready implementation.
• Translate complex distributed-system behavior into clear, intuitive interfaces for developers.
• Design interfaces that clearly communicate execution timelines, retries, queues, state, failures, and other system activity.
• Build data-intensive experiences capable of handling large result sets, live updates, filtering, search, charts, and timelines.
• Design and implement robust interface states, including loading, empty, partial, error, single-result, and high-volume scenarios.
• Optimize front-end performance across rendering, data loading, perceived latency, long lists, and interactive experiences.
• Profile and resolve performance bottlenecks, including unnecessary re-renders, rendering costs, and bundle-size issues.
• Maintain a consistent mental model across the UI, SDKs, documentation, and other product surfaces.
• Turn technically complex concepts into simple and visually compelling product experiences.
• Establish and maintain a high visual and interaction-design standard across the product.
• Build reusable design systems in code, including components, interaction patterns, and architectural conventions.
• Develop motion and interaction patterns that communicate state, time, and system dynamics.
• Collaborate directly with engineers and founding team members to shape product and design decisions.
• Bring a strong independent point of view to design discussions and challenge assumptions when appropriate.
• Read API specifications, queries, and backend code to understand technical requirements and system behavior.
• Use AI tools and workflows to accelerate development, solve problems, and independently take features from concept to production.
• Contribute to adjacent product areas where strong developer experience, design, and front-end engineering can create additional impact.
• Help establish scalable patterns that enable other contributors to build consistently on the product.

Requirements:

• Strong production front-end engineering experience with React, TypeScript, modern HTML, and CSS.
• Ability to independently take features from concept and design through implementation, deployment, and release.
• A strong portfolio of shipped work demonstrating both design craft and the ability to build what you design.
• Excellent visual design sensibility and a consistently high bar for product quality.
• Strong information-design skills, particularly the ability to turn large amounts of data into clear and quickly understandable interfaces.
• Experience designing and building data-intensive interfaces involving pagination, virtualization, filtering, search, charts, or similarly large datasets.
• Strong front-end performance expertise, including profiling rendering, optimizing long lists, reducing unnecessary re-renders, and managing bundle size.
• Ability to demonstrate measurable performance improvements where possible.
• Experience using visual storytelling to make complex technical concepts intuitive and accessible.
• Ability to implement motion and interaction design directly in code.
• Experience building scalable design systems through reusable components and coherent interaction patterns.
• Ability to read API specifications, queries, and backend code and understand how they affect front-end experiences.
• Strong autonomy and ownership, with the confidence to make design decisions without requiring extensive direction.
• Ability to collaborate directly with senior technical stakeholders and product leadership.
• Willingness to challenge assumptions and advocate for a strong product and design point of view.
• Practical AI literacy and experience using AI tools to increase productivity and independently unblock development work.
• Experience with developer tools, infrastructure products, or AI products would be advantageous.
• Experience with data visualization, including timelines, traces, graphs, or high-volume time-series data, would be a plus.
• Knowledge of accessibility and keyboard-first interface design would be beneficial.
• Creative development experience with technologies such as Three.js, GLSL shaders, 3D, generative, or game-like web experiences would be advantageous.
• Comfort reaching into backend systems when required to deliver a complete feature.
• Experience deploying and owning serverless applications using platforms such as Cloudflare Workers, Vercel, or similar would be beneficial.
• Understanding of edge runtimes, caching, and cold-start considerations would be a plus.
• Comfortable working as a senior hands-on individual contributor rather than primarily managing a design team.

Benefits:

• Remote-first opportunity in Europe, with the Netherlands among the supported locations.
• Exceptional candidates based remotely in the United States may also be considered.
• Minimal travel, with occasional team offsites.
• High level of autonomy and direct involvement in product and design decisions.
• Opportunity to own major product experiences from initial concept through production.
• Work at the intersection of product design, front-end engineering, developer tools, infrastructure, and AI.
• Opportunity to work on technically sophisticated products where performance, reliability, and clarity are critical.
• Close collaboration with experienced engineers and founding team members.
• Opportunity to establish design systems and patterns that influence the broader product.
• Environment suited to a senior hands-on IC who wants to combine strong design judgment with production-quality engineering.