Design Engineer

Rheaction • New York, NY

45d

About The Position

One of our clients is looking for a Design Engineer who can move seamlessly between design and code. You'll work at the intersection of product design and frontend engineering—turning ideas into polished, intuitive, production-ready experiences. You should be equally comfortable exploring an interaction in Figma, prototyping it in code, and shipping the final experience to users. This is a highly hands-on role for someone with exceptional visual and interaction design instincts who also has the technical ability to build what they design. You'll have significant ownership over how the product looks, feels, and behaves.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience in design engineering, product design with strong frontend development experience, frontend engineering with exceptional design skills, or a similar role.
• Strong portfolio demonstrating high-quality product design and interfaces you've actually built.
• Excellent visual design fundamentals, including typography, hierarchy, spacing, layout, and color.
• Strong understanding of interaction design, motion, and micro-interactions.
• Advanced proficiency with Figma.
• Strong frontend development skills with React, TypeScript, HTML, and CSS.
• Experience with modern frontend frameworks and tooling such as Next.js, Tailwind CSS, Framer Motion, or similar technologies.
• Ability to build responsive, accessible, performant interfaces.
• Experience creating or contributing to design systems and reusable component libraries.
• Strong product intuition and an ability to simplify complex workflows.
• Ability to operate with ambiguity and take an idea from a rough concept to a shipped experience.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

Nice To Haves

• Care as much about how something feels as whether it technically works.
• Have a great portfolio
• Frequently notice small UI details that other people miss.
• Prefer building working prototypes over creating lengthy specifications.
• Can open Figma to explore an idea and then jump directly into the codebase to build it.
• Have strong opinions about product quality but are comfortable iterating quickly.
• Enjoy working closely with founders and engineers.
• Thrive in environments with high ownership and relatively little bureaucracy.
• Are excited about shaping both the product experience and the systems used to build it.
• Experience with early-stage or high-growth startups.
• Experience with AI-native products, developer tools, B2B SaaS, or technically complex products.
• Experience with Framer, WebGL, Three.js, GSAP, or advanced web animation.
• Experience building interactive prototypes that became production features.
• Experience creating a design system from the ground up.
• Experience with data visualization or complex application interfaces.
• Experience with AI-assisted design and development workflows.
• Experience with open-source projects, side projects, or independently shipped products demonstrating strong design-engineering craft.

Responsibilities

• Design and build polished, production-ready user experiences from concept through launch.
• Translate product ideas and rough concepts into high-quality interfaces and interactions.
• Prototype rapidly in both Figma and code to explore new product experiences.
• Build responsive frontend experiences using React, TypeScript, and modern web technologies.
• Create thoughtful animations, transitions, and micro-interactions that make the product feel exceptional.
• Collaborate closely with founders, product, design, and engineering to shape product direction.
• Develop and maintain reusable components and scalable design systems.
• Improve consistency across the product while raising the overall quality bar for design.
• Sweat the details—from typography, spacing, and layout to responsiveness, performance, and interaction states.
• Move quickly from idea prototype production while maintaining a high level of craft.

Benefits

• Meaningful ownership over a product at a stage where individual decisions can have an outsized impact.
• Empowered to design, prototype, build, and ship —working directly with the people shaping the product and company.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed