Staff Design Engineer

Campfire•San Francisco, CA

6d•$180,000 - $250,000•Onsite

About The Position

Campfire builds modern ERP software for finance teams — bringing accounting, close, and reporting workflows into one fast, intuitive system. We're a small, senior team obsessed with craft, speed, and making complex financial software feel simple to use. We're looking for a Staff Design Engineer to help shape the core experience of Campfire's ERP platform. You'll take on our thorniest, highest-leverage design problems — the ones that touch multiple teams, span complex workflows, and require deep systems thinking. This is a senior individual-contributor role: you'll set design direction, raise the bar for craft across the team, and partner directly with engineering and product leadership to ship work that materially changes how finance teams operate. You'll have significant ownership over ambiguous, cross-cutting problems (think: reimagining the general ledger experience, or designing a coherent system for how data flows between modules) rather than a single feature area.

Requirements

8+ years of product design experience, with a track record of owning complex, high-impact product areas end to end
Strong systems thinking — you can zoom out to see how a feature fits the broader product, and zoom in on pixel-level details
Excellent communication skills; you can build alignment with engineers, PMs, and executives, and explain design rationale clearly
Comfort working in ambiguity, with incomplete requirements, and evolving your own scope
Able to code your own prototypes (HTML/CSS and enough JavaScript to build interactive, functional mockups)

Nice To Haves

Experience designing for data-dense, workflow-heavy software (fintech, ERP, dev tools, B2B SaaS, or similar) is a strong plus
A portfolio that shows range: 0-to-1 work, and rigorous iteration on existing systems
Prior experience at an early- or growth-stage startup, with a bias toward shipping over perfecting in isolation

Responsibilities

Own end-to-end design for complex, ambiguous problem spaces spanning multiple product areas — from framing the problem to shipping and iterating post-launch
Partner with product and engineering leads as a peer, shaping roadmap and strategy, not just executing against a spec
Design for dense, data-heavy workflows (tables, ledgers, reconciliation, reporting) in a way that stays clear and fast to use
Strengthen and evolve Campfire's design system and interaction patterns so the product feels coherent as it grows
Mentor other designers, give sharp critique, and raise the craft bar across the team
Talk directly to customers — finance and accounting teams — to ground design decisions in how they actually work
Drive design reviews and help the team make faster, better-informed decisions