Design Engineer

Rillet•San Francisco, CA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Rillet is seeking a Design Engineer to help define product craft at the company. This role sits at the intersection of design and engineering, requiring a strong sense of detail in both visual design and code. The Design Engineer will own the entire product lifecycle from concept to launch, playing a key role in Rillet's platform refresh. This involves evolving the design language, building out the design system, and translating brand direction into a cohesive product experience. The role requires close collaboration with product designers and the engineering team, with significant autonomy in design decisions. The ideal candidate possesses exceptional taste, curiosity, and a passion for creating financial software that is fast, elegant, precise, and dynamic.

Requirements

Exceptional taste and ability to refine designs.
Deep curiosity and exploration of new products, tools, and patterns.
Genuine enjoyment of both design and engineering, seeing them as integrated.
Strong product instincts, reasoning from customer needs to interface decisions.
Frontend fluency with modern web interface development.
Comfort working from ambiguity and forming points of view on open-ended product areas.
Systems thinking, focusing on reusable primitives, scalable patterns, and design tokens.
High craft in details such as spacing, type, hierarchy, motion, affordances, loading states, empty states, keyboard behavior, accessibility, and performance.
A portfolio showcasing strong visual judgment, interaction sensibility, and execution from exploration to production.
Comfort using AI tools to enhance speed and automation in the design-engineering workflow.
A bias toward shipping quickly without compromising quality.

Nice To Haves

React experience is preferred.
Svelte experience is a bonus.

Responsibilities

Drive Rillet’s platform refresh across core surfaces like the launchpad, side nav, login, navigation patterns, empty states, tables, workflows, and other high-frequency product experiences.
Turn rough ideas into shipped product, from initial Figma exploration or customer problem to polished, production-ready UI.
Build and evolve Rillet’s design system, including tokens, components, interaction patterns, motion principles, layout primitives, and documentation.
Translate the upcoming brand refresh into the product thoughtfully, ensuring platform cohesion.
Raise the bar for product quality in visual design, interaction design, accessibility, responsiveness, performance, and micro-details.
Prototype in code when Figma is insufficient, particularly for motion, interaction, responsiveness, keyboard behavior, AI workflows, and complex financial surfaces.
Identify and automate design-to-code workflows, potentially using AI, to enhance speed and brand consistency.
Partner with product designers, engineers, and founders to shape the product experience, offering opinions and alternatives.
Proactively identify and fix design or implementation issues.