Staff Design Engineer

Requirements and responsibilities

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You Will:

Own the quality bar for user experience across the Render product. You'll identify, design, and ship interface improvements end-to-end — from interaction design and visual polish through to production-ready code.
Drive design-led projects with full autonomy. You'll initiate and lead projects that improve how Render looks and feels — the kind of polish, interaction quality, and craft that typically gets deprioritized in an engineering backlog but defines whether a product feels good to use.
Ship production features as a full contributor to the codebase. This isn't a prototyping role. You'll work in our React/TypeScript frontend and collaborate with backend engineers to deliver complete features that serve real users.
Bridge design and engineering, eliminating the gap. You'll partner directly with product designers and engineers, collapsing the distance between intent and implementation. You'll consult on feasibility, push designs further than Figma can express, and prototype in code where it matters.
Elevate craft standards across the team. Through your work, code review, and design feedback, you'll raise the ambient quality of everything Render ships. You'll champion accessibility, performance, animation polish, and the invisible details that make an interface feel alive.
Shape design systems and component architecture. You'll contribute to and evolve our shared design system — not just maintaining it, but ensuring it empowers other engineers and designers to ship at a high quality bar without bottlenecks.
Collaborate with product, design, and engineering leadership on roadmap priorities, ensuring that craft and user experience have a seat at the table alongside feature delivery and infrastructure work.

We're Looking For:

8+ years of professional experience shipping software products, with significant time spent working at the intersection of design and frontend engineering. You've operated as a design engineer, frontend engineer with strong design sensibility, or a designer who codes — the title matters less than the work.
Exceptional taste and craft. You have an eye for detail that borders on obsessive — typography, spacing, motion, color, interaction feedback. You notice when something is 2px off and it bothers you. You've shipped work that other practitioners admire.
Production-grade frontend engineering skills. Deep fluency in React, TypeScript, CSS, and modern web platform APIs. You write code that is performant, accessible, and maintainable — not just code that looks good in a demo.
Ability to design independently. You can run a design process from problem framing through high-fidelity execution without requiring a designer to hand you a finished comp. You're comfortable in Figma, but you're equally comfortable designing directly in code.
Strong sense of ownership and initiative. You don't wait to be told what to improve. You scan for papercuts, identify opportunities for delight, and ship fixes and improvements proactively.
Experience working in high-fidelity, close to the final medium. You prototype and iterate in the browser, not in slides. You understand that the feel of an interaction can only be evaluated in its real context.
Excellent communication and collaboration skills. You can articulate design rationale to engineers, give constructive design feedback to designers, and advocate for craft in planning conversations with product and leadership.

Nice-to-Haves:

Experience building developer tools, cloud platforms, or infrastructure products where UX is a competitive advantage.
Track record of open-source contributions, design essays, or creative side projects that demonstrate your craft and point of view.
Experience with animation and interaction design — spring physics, gesture handling, transitions that feel physical and intentional.
Experience building or significantly contributing to a design system at scale.
Familiarity with modern tooling for software build and deploy processes.
Experience in using AI coding agents to accelerate delivery in alignment with best practices for a codebase.

Benefits

This opportunity is also eligible for equity with early-exercise options and extended exercise windows.
4 weeks of paid vacation.
14 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all parents to bond with a newly born, adopted, or fostered child. We will also work with you to create a supportive plan of return.
Long-term disability, life insurance, and 401K plans.
100% employer-paid medical coverage and 99% employer-paid dental and vision coverage for you and a dependent. FSAs and HSAs are available as well.
Monthly lifestyle stipend for wellness, mental health and therapy, hobbies, etc.
Monthly cell phone and internet subsidy.
Commuter benefits for Renders in the Bay Area, and home office stipends for remote Renders.
Continuous learning benefits & related support.

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