Staff Design Engineer

Onebrief

2d•Remote

About The Position

As a Design Engineer at Onebrief, you are the bridge between Product Design and Frontend Engineering—turning vision into working, high-fidelity experiences. You will prototype, validate, and implement systems that make Onebrief intuitive and powerful for planners in demanding environments. You’ll collaborate closely with Designers, Engineers, and Product Managers to accelerate AI‑enhanced workflows, robust component systems, and intuitive interactions that define Onebrief’s next-generation UX. Craft and execution are shared across Design and Engineering. Your ownership is understanding how the team operates today and elevating it, strengthening Figma‑to‑code translation, evolving component libraries, and building targeted prototypes that help us improve from alignment to delivery. Your impact is measured by higher quality, tighter alignment, and faster delivery of complex features. The work you do will directly shape how commands plan, brief, and execute missions—enabling better decisions, faster.

Requirements

10+ years of experience moving ideas through design and into prototypes, ideally with real user impact and usage data.
Comfortable owning a problem from sketch to spec to shipped UI.
Experienced with data-dense, highly interactive UIs and the constraints of low connectivity, strict permissions, and audit requirements.
Experience working with APIs and reasoning about data flows.
Excellent written communication—async by default. You show your work through flows, prototypes, and specs.
Eligible for and able to obtain a U.S. security clearance (U.S. citizenship required).

Nice To Haves

Background in mapping, geospatial, or real-time collaboration systems.
Experience in presentation or briefing workflows.
Exposure to defense, public sector, or other high-trust environments.
Familiarity with motion design, accessibility, or system hardening for reliability.

Responsibilities

Collaborate closely with designers on core real-time collaboration features such as dashboards, maps, timeline visualizations, and briefing workflows—cornerstones of operational planning in Onebrief.
Translate mission and user needs into functional, data-driven interactive prototypes that validate workflows and behaviors before development.
Help evolve Onebrief’s design system, ensuring component durability, performance, and accessibility across verticals. Includes contributions in both Figma and code.
Extend the system’s tokens, components, and interaction patterns for consistency without slowing delivery.
Partner with engineers to implement design at scale, balancing fidelity, feasibility, and performance.
Move rapidly from sketch to prototype to production, using the right fidelity for each stage (Figma or code-adjacent).
Validate usability through prototypes and tests that prove solutions before development.
Leverage AI-powered tools (e.g. Figma Make, V0, Cursor, Lovable, etc.) to accelerate prototyping and validate behaviors quickly.
Build “real-feel” prototypes using APIs and live data where possible to reduce implementation risk.
Ensure shipped features meet accessibility, reliability, and performance standards expected by military users.
Participate in QA, build reviews, and post-release audits to continuously improve production quality.
With Product Management: translate ambiguous goals and early concepts into clear artifacts and scoped MVPs; align on measurable success criteria and surface risks early with de-risking spikes.
With Engineering: Align to Onebrief’s frontend workflows and conventions to partner seamlessly; specify states, data flows, and edge cases; write crisp interaction specs; resolve gaps quickly while ensuring feasibility, accessibility, and performance.
With Design: evolve and improve the design system end-to-end; strengthen Figma-to-code translation of components (structure, states, tokens); and scale the system for varied environments (accessibility, contrast, font scaling, low/high-res displays) across surfaces.