Design Engineer

About the role

The role is for a Design Engineer who will be responsible for translating Figma designs into production-ready React and TypeScript, owning and evolving Serval's design system implementation, and raising the bar for front-end craft across the engineering team.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate closely with our Product Designer, frontend engineers, and founders to translate Figma designs into production-ready React and TypeScript with exact fidelity — no drift, no approximation.
• Own and evolve Serval's design system implementation, building a shared component library that serves as the single source of truth for both design and engineering.
• Leverage AI-assisted workflows to accelerate the design-to-code pipeline — reducing cycles, catching inconsistencies early, and keeping design and implementation in perpetual lockstep.
• Build and refine the Serval product experience.
• Know when to move fast and rough to validate an idea, and when to slow down and engineer it precisely — and have the judgment to tell the difference.
• Design and implement motion and micro-interactions that bring the product to life — transitions, state changes, loading patterns, and feedback loops that make complex agent workflows feel responsive and alive.
• Maintain visual and interaction consistency across every product surface, from core workflows to edge cases.

Requirements

• 4+ years of experience as a frontend engineer with a strong design background — you care deeply about craft and it shows in your work.
• Deep proficiency in React and TypeScript — you write clean, scalable, production-grade front-end code.
• Fluency in Figma — you can read, inspect, and implement designs with precision, moving fluidly between the design file and the codebase.
• A sharp eye for typography, spacing, motion, and visual hierarchy — you notice when something is off and you fix it.
• Strong command of animation and interaction principles — you know when motion adds clarity and when it gets in the way, and you can implement both with CSS, Framer Motion, or equivalent.
• Experience building and maintaining design systems or component libraries used across a product.
• The judgment to navigate tradeoffs between quality and speed — knowing which one the moment calls for and making the right call.
• Comfort with ambiguity and zero-to-one product development — you can navigate ambiguous direction and execute with conviction.

Qualifications

• Nice to Have:
• A portfolio or examples of shipped work — not required, but great candidates often have something to show, whether that's a side project, open source contribution, or motion-heavy UI.
• Experience with AI-assisted design or code generation tools (v0, Cursor, Locofy, or similar).
• Some backend exposure — enough to understand how data flows through the systems your UI sits on top of.
• Familiarity with the rest of our stack is a plus: Go, Temporal, Postgres, Kubernetes, AWS.
• Background in enterprise or B2B SaaS products — you understand the unique needs of business users.
• Early-stage startup experience, ideally as a founding or early engineer.

Benefits

We offer impact, growth, and a culture that values innovation, ownership, accountability, and fun.

Pay

$175K - $300K

Schedule

Full-time