Senior Design Engineer (Freelance)
About The Position
AIP, R/GA’s AI Products group, builds its own products rather than client campaigns. Its first product, BRDNA Sequencer™, encodes a brand’s design system—including components, patterns, voice, and rules—into structured context that coding agents can use to create on-brand designs. It is a collaboration tool that helps designers and marketers encode design systems and create new designs alongside AI agents. The Senior Design Engineer will build and maintain the product’s AI-to-Figma pipeline, translating Figma design systems into structured markdown and retrievable context for AI manipulation, then translating the results back into faithful Figma designs. The role focuses on delivering consistent, on-brand results across different brands and models, and diagnosing whether output issues originate in the source system, structure, retrieval, or prompts. The engineer will own the customer-facing product surface, including onboarding and the self-serve journey, and will design and build the front end alongside full-stack engineers without a handoff. They will work with leadership and research to set self-serve KPIs and use metrics to guide product decisions. This is an early-stage, pre-product-market-fit role with end-to-end ownership and a long-term product mindset, focused on helping transform a services-heavy offering into a scalable product. The role is freelance, based in the United States, and scheduled for 40 or more hours per week, Monday through Friday. The project runs from October 19, 2026, through December 18, 2026. The hiring range is $4,000 to $6,500 per week.
Requirements
- Hands-on experience building and maintaining design systems.
- Experience owning a design system through real product-team adoption and change.
- Strong prompt-engineering craft, including building layered, multi-hierarchy prompt systems that produce production-grade output.
- Ability to diagnose which prompt or system layer is responsible when AI output degrades.
- Prompt work that holds up across models and platforms rather than depending on one provider.
- Experience with React and Next.js for product development.
- Experience with Supabase for data and backend.
- Experience using Figma MCP to access design systems.
- Ability to work with a model-agnostic approach across Figma, Claude, ChatGPT, and Frontify.
- Experience with Cursor and Claude Code.
- Must be located in the United States.
- Availability for 40 or more hours per week, Monday through Friday, during the project period.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with Figma Variables, the Plugin or REST API, Code Connect, and library architecture across multiple consuming teams.
- Practical experience with retrieval and embeddings, including chunking strategy, RAG, fine-tuning, and LoRAs.
- Experience systematically evaluating model output and building evaluation harnesses.
- Experience shipping onboarding flows and improving activation through product changes.
- Experience helping take a product from 0 to 1 to 10 and maintaining it while customers actively use it.
Responsibilities
- Build and maintain the AI-to-Figma encoding pipeline, translating design systems into structured markdown and retrievable context and translating AI-manipulated results back into Figma designs.
- Create consistent, on-brand output across brands and supported AI models.
- Diagnose output problems across source design systems, structure, retrieval, and prompts.
- Own the customer-facing product front end, including onboarding and self-serve flows.
- Audit and rebuild the self-serve journey from a Figma library to agents building on-brand designs.
- Design and build the product front end alongside full-stack engineers, without a handoff.
- Set self-serve KPIs with leadership and research, and use metrics to inform product decisions.
- Make product and technical decisions with a long-term product mindset, helping scale the offering beyond services-heavy delivery.
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What This Job Offers
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
