Design Engineer (Product UI/UX)

Location: Remote, international
Type: Full-time contractor
Level: Mid to Senior

We’re looking for a Design Engineer who can bridge product design and frontend implementation.

This is not a pure designer role and not a generic frontend engineering role.

You will own the process from rough product idea to polished shipped experience:

This role is for someone with strong product taste who can also ship.

Own UX and UI execution across key parts of the product
Translate product goals and rough concepts into clear flows, wireframes, and polished interfaces
Design directly in Figma or similar tools when useful
Work closely with AI-assisted tooling in your workflow
Implement production-ready frontend UI yourself
Improve existing product surfaces for clarity, usability, speed, and polish
Work closely with the founder to turn fast-moving ideas into shipped product
Establish and evolve reusable design patterns and UI systems
Sweat details like spacing, hierarchy, motion, states, onboarding, empty states, and error handling
Balance speed with taste in a startup environment

Experience designing and shipping customer-facing product experiences
Strong portfolio showing both design thinking and shipped product work
Frontend proficiency in modern web stacks such as:
- React
- TypeScript / JavaScript
- HTML/CSS
- component-based UI systems
Experience with Figma or equivalent design tools
Familiarity with AI-assisted code tooling (IDE agents, CLI agents, and/or tool-based agents)
Strong understanding of interaction design, information hierarchy, and UX patterns
Ability to create polished, production-ready UI rather than only prototypes

Experience and comfort with designing and building fluid animations (with libraries like PixiJS, Three.js, etc) and micro-interactions
Experience as a founding designer, design engineer, or early product hire
Experience working on consumer products, creator tools, gaming, community products, or live products
Experience building and maintaining design systems
Experience improving onboarding, retention, engagement, or monetization surfaces

Not a pure brand/marketing designer
Not a pure frontend ticket-taker
Not a role where someone hands you finished designs and you only code them
Not a role for someone who only makes pretty screens without strong UX reasoning

We care most about:

A strong candidate will be able to show examples where they:

Design Engineer (Product UI/UX) - 45116491185