Design Engineer

Location New York City, hybrid: one to two days a week in our Manhattan office.

Every year, millions of people qualify for things they're entitled to (housing, health coverage, food support) and never receive them, not because they're ineligible but because the system asks the most of the people with the least room to spare. Harmony is reimagining how people access essential services, starting with affordable housing in New York City.

We're early, and we're moving fast. You'll join a small team at the ground floor and help lay out the phases of a mission that begins with housing in New York and runs through every essential service in the country.

The role

We're hiring a Design Engineer: Harmony's product designer, the person who owns how our products look, feel, and work, and who ships their own frontend changes by working through coding agents. The app surfaces are yours, from the visual language down to the component. Nobody sits upstream of you deciding what a screen should look like.

Roughly 70% of this role is design and 30% is code. We have engineers to build features; you'll need to be self-sufficient prototyping and able to make frontend changes to production yourself. How our design system should work, and the tools and processes around it, will be yours to decide. If you're an exceptional designer who can also ship code, we'd love to meet you. If you're an engineer with a soft spot for design, this one probably isn't for you. Our frontend is Next.js, React, and TypeScript, with the design system in Storybook; you don't need to know all of it on day one.

What you'll do

• Own Harmony's design system: visual language, components, tokens, patterns, and documentation
• Build the skills, agents, and processes that make design a fast part of how we ship
• Work directly with product and engineering to research, design, and ship what's next
• Notice what's wrong in the product, then design and ship the fix
• Prototype quickly, test your assumptions with real users, and iterate on what you learn
• Turn complicated, high-stakes processes into experiences that feel simple and calm
• Make the whole team better at product thinking: join the research, weigh in on strategy, and run design reviews
• Pick up whatever else the team needs. We're at a stage where everyone is close to every part of the work

What we're looking for

• Strong UX judgment. Flows, information architecture, and the unhappy paths. You design for people under real constraints.
• Opinionated but collaborative. You have strong taste, you can say why, and you change your mind when the evidence says to.
• You collaborate well. You're a good partner to product, engineering, and everyone else on a small team: you work through constraints together, and people like building with you.
• AI-native. Coding agents are part of how you design and build every day.
• You ship. You're comfortable writing and releasing frontend code to build and maintain the design system, prototype your own ideas, and land product improvements without waiting on an engineer. Backend isn't part of the job (unless you want it to be); we have a team for that.
• You communicate well. In writing and in person, with product, engineers, customers, and founders alike. On a small team, effective communication is vital.
• You've authored a design system before, not just maintained someone else's decisions
• Experience designing for people in stressful or high-stakes situations: healthcare, benefits, finance, government
• Experience in a regulated or compliance-adjacent environment (fintech, healthtech, govtech); our product handles sensitive personal data and the right person isn't cavalier about it
• Brand, marketing site, or deck work; none of it is required here, but interest or past experience is a plus
• You've worked at an early-stage startup before

We read every one.

Pay and equity

$120,000 to $170,000 base depending on experience, plus meaningful early-stage equity. Unlimited PTO. You must be authorized to work in the US; we're not able to sponsor visas at this time.

• A short note in your own words (two or three paragraphs) on why this role, where you're strongest, and what you want to get better at.

Harmony is an equal opportunity employer.