Senior Product Design Engineer

Cortex

1d•$160,000 - $190,000•Remote

About The Position

Cortex is seeking a Senior Product Design Engineer to act as a liaison between the design and frontend engineering teams. This is a hybrid role for a generalist who enjoys working with code. The ideal candidate is a designer who primarily works in code but is more than just a 'vibe coder.' While AI tools are used at Cortex to increase velocity, the team remains fully accountable for the code they ship. The role reports to the design team, which includes two designers who also code. The Senior Product Design Engineer will fully own the design system from Figma through implementation, contribute across the codebase to ship features, reinforce consistent patterns, and prioritize creating a world-class user experience. The company highly values craft and aims to keep Cortex at the forefront of products for engineering teams.

Requirements

5-7+ years working at the intersection of design and code in a product-led company.
Startup experience is highly desirable.
Experience with developer tools or enterprise SaaS companies is a plus.
Either owned or been a major contributor to a design system before, ideally seeing the impact of designs over a larger scale or significant period of time.
Deep experience with React, Typescript, and Tailwind is preferred (open to talented candidates who can ramp up quickly).
A portfolio of work (or GitHub profile) that clearly demonstrates skill and attention to detail in both product design and frontend development.
Passionate about creating beautiful, useful, and usable interfaces guided by user feedback, while being comfortable making choices without it.

Nice To Haves

Startup experience is highly desirable.
Bonus points for experience with developer tools or enterprise SaaS companies.
Open to talented candidates who haven’t had the opportunity to work with React, Typescript, and Tailwind before, but will need to understand how quickly you can ramp up.

Responsibilities

Contribute to raising the design bar at Cortex by working with the design team to push the boundaries of design and user experience, crafting a delightful experience.
Ensure continuous improvement and animation by identifying opportunities to maintain best practices, reduce papercuts, iterate on clunky user experiences, polish microinteractions, and add UI animation.
Own the design system end-to-end, in both Figma and code, collaborating with designers and developers who consume components.
Assist the design, product management, and engineering teams in rapid prototyping when a high-fidelity prototype is the best tool to illustrate functionality.
Design and ship UI-heavy features across the product surface area, ensuring components are performant and well-tested, while collaborating with product management, frontend, and backend developers.
Maintain a strong attention to detail, regularly identifying areas of inconsistency and incompleteness, and proactively working to make the product feel polished and professional.