Staff Design Engineer

Who you are

• 10+ years of product design experience, ideally in B2B SaaS or AI-focused roles
• At least 2-3 years operating at a Staff / Principal level, with proven ownership of complex initiatives
• Comfort in code sufficient to prototype and validate design ideas, without being primarily defined by engineering depth — this is a design-first role with a strong foundation in code
• The ability to see the difference between fine and right, and to say why out loud: taste here is judgment you can articulate, turn into a rule, and hand to someone else — the kind that notices the 1px that's off, the easing a beat too slow, the contrast that technically passes and visually fails
• An end-to-end understanding of the product — where a pattern breaks down in a real user flow, or where a component that looks fine in isolation causes friction in context
• A track record of influence beyond your own output: setting a quality bar explicit enough that others can apply it, and connecting fragmented, team-by-team work into something coherent
• Craft signals including visual craft and taste, pattern recognition at scale, motion and timing as a design decision, multiplayer interaction grammar (presence, cursors, conflict, co-authorship), and real fluency with AI tools and AI-driven product moments — enough to prototype your own ideas without needing an engineer to stand up a first draft
• Systems and governance thinking: the ability to articulate the contribution rules that keep a system coherent as it scales, even if someone else writes the enforcement code

What the job involves

• You own the design system — not by writing the infrastructure that enforces it, but by deciding what "great" looks like and turning that judgment into something the system can pull into the design process
• The design system is AI-native, meaning that agents will generate the first draft of the UI, using the tokens, components, and patterns you've defined
• That changes the job. It used to be enough to design a good screen
• Now the job is to design the soul and rules a screen gets generated from — to encode taste, not just constraints
• This is a design-first role with a strong foundation in code. You think and communicate in prototypes because they're more honest than a static mock
• You reach for a quick build to test whether an idea actually feels right, not to ship production infrastructure
• You're not the person building the rendering engine; you're the person with the eye to know when the rendering engine got it wrong
• You hold and push the quality bar forwards; meaning you don't only define what great design and taste looks like, you encode it
• Identify the interaction patterns, hierarchy rules, and softer signals (rhythm, restraint, spacing that "feels right") that keep AI-generated UI from feeling machine-made, then work with engineering to get those signals into the guardrails that catch violations before ship
• Push token thinking into motion, easing, spatial transitions, and multiplayer states like presence and cursors — the aesthetic decisions that make the canvas feel alive
• Partner closely with engineering, making sure performance constraints don't flatten the product into something generic
• Build the patterns, guidelines, and examples that make every designer and AI-assisted contributor faster and more confident. Write things down — foundation-level thinking compounds