Principle Design Engineer

fiveonefour•Portland, OR

About The Position

The role At the very core of our product and our company is one thing: developer experience. This role sits right at that core. We serve a highly technical developer user, and we believe great developer experience is grounded in both great design and great engineering. This role is an interesting one that will span both disciplines: design and engineering. You’re either a designer who loves to code, or you’re a frontend engineer who loves to design. As our first Technical Designer / Design Engineer / UX Engineer (we can figure out the right title for you), you’ll start by reporting to the Co-founder/CPO (that's me 👋), although we may find this role works best embedded with core engineering and reporting to my co-founder, our CTO. In this role, you will shape the experiences through which our users interface with our product and our company. You will help build a future that serves both human and agentic developers and meets them where they are. You have a strong sense of UX/UI design principles and user-driven design processes. You have great taste and care deeply about aesthetics. You also have solid frontend development skills, a deep empathy for developers, and hard-earned opinions about what great DX actually feels like. You prototype and implement your designs in code to rapidly iterate to compelling, production-ready solutions. I expect your primary focus will be product UX, especially the GUI, but you will also work on programmatic interfaces (APIs, CLI, etc), as well as upstream touchpoints in brand, marketing, and onboarding interfaces. You’ll work on both our open source framework MooseStack, and our commercial hosting platform. You'll work directly with the founding team on a day to day basis. You’ll be a core part of the product team, collaborating closely with product management, product marketing, and core engineering. You’ll of course engage directly with our growing community of developers, users, and early champions. This is a hands on, fast moving role. You’ll start as an individual contributor, with the opportunity to coach and mentor the designer we already have on the team. There’s also potential for you to lead a team or even lead the entire function, as we scale and grow, if this career path is interesting to you. What to expect from me I am here for your long term professional success. This is the cornerstone of my approach to people management. I’m committed to helping you achieve your career goals – ideally within Fiveonefour – but even beyond, if that’s where your best path leads. This means I will invest in you, understanding your strengths and weaknesses, and coaching you through new skills and development. I will lead by example, as well as by sharing my experiences and lessons learned the hard way. I will be clear and direct when you are falling short and when I fall short myself. I will challenge you and give you opportunities to stretch your skills, but I will be there for you to support you when you need it - as long as you ask. And I’d love to have fun with you along the way ;) What to expect from the team Our team is composed of ambitious and pragmatic individuals who value each other's wellbeing. We embrace the energy of a startup environment, and our diverse backgrounds and experiences make every day’s interactions interesting. We’re all passionate about our work, and while we put in the long hours needed to be competitive as a high growth startup, we also emphasize flexibility - for example, many of us are parents and get creative to make startup-life work with parent-life.

Requirements

7+ years as a technical-leaning designer and/or design-leaning developer
Portfolio of beautiful, intuitive, innovative features/products you’ve shipped
Strong visual design aesthetic and UI/UX design skills - you can create, review and self approve a design
Strong software prototyping skills - you’ve developed end-to-end, scalable, accessible products/features, with or without vibe coding support
Comfort and competency with our design and dev tools/tech, with deep expertise in either the dev or design tooling (or both!)
Design: Figma, especially design systems and components to enable rapid, high quality iteration
Dev tools: Git, IDEs, Claude code and other AI copilots
Languages/frameworks: Typescript, Tailwind, React, ShadCN
Experience running user-facing discovery and validation

Nice To Haves

experience designing/building developer tools

Responsibilities

Drive the best possible developer experiences for our users across all interactions with our products and company
Help shape product strategy and direction, and represent the best interests of the developer user at all times
Learn directly from our users through high velocity product and design discovery and validation
Leverage AI as a core accelerator to your workflow and leverage generator on your differentiated human skills
Drive the overall taste of the product and company on both aesthetics and interaction design with an opinionated sense of style
Capture flows and rapidly build and iterate through low to high fidelity designs
Iterate in code, skipping classic design tools entirely where it can accelerate outcomes
Build working prototypes and MVPs that internal and external users can get hands on with
Collaborate closely with peers in product and engineering, shepherding UI/UX/DX decisions from idea to shipped product to user engagement with high velocity and quality
Work with a constant curiosity for our users, empathy for their pains and opportunities, and passion for the problems we can solve and change we can bring to the world of data and development