Design Engineer
The kid who brought power tools to the sandlot. Design engineers don't hand work off. They build it, so read the shipping column like a box score. In the yard they're the safest pick on the board: whatever else your team is missing, someone who can design a thing and then make it real covers a lot of sins.
In real hiring, the design engineer lives in the gap that used to be a handoff. They design in code, prototype with real data, ship production front-end, and keep the design system and motion work honest. Teams started hiring for the role once they noticed quality dies in translation. What to scout: taste plus TypeScript, prototypes that actually run, and a commit history where the polish landed.
Free agents: 61 available
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Meng To@MengTo
Design EngineerFounded Design+Code, which has spent a decade teaching designers to code and developers to design.
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Rogie King@rogie
Product DesignerProduct designer at Figma behind Draw and Shaders, plus a prolific run of plugins that do things Figma never planned for.
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Jordan Singer@jsngr
Product DesignerCo-founder and CEO of Mainframe, after Figma, Square and Diagram, which Figma bought.
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Adrian Kuleszo@adriankuleszo
Product DesignerRuns Designme, a design-and-dev partner that has shipped for Cluely, Ethena, Lightdash, and a hundred-odd other startups.
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Jhey Tompkins@jh3yy
Design EngineerBuilds interfaces and then explains them, which he'll tell you is the rarer skill.
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Brad Frost@brad_frost
Design EngineerWrote Atomic Design, which is why your components are called atoms and molecules and why someone on your team is still arguing about what…
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James McDonald@jamesm
Web DesignerRuns Wireframe, a studio promising world-class visual design in weeks rather than months, after staff design stints at Clerk and Tailwind.
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Pablo Stanley@pablostanley
Product DesignerDrew Humaaans and Open Peeps, the modular illustration libraries that ended up in half the startup landing pages on the internet.
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Rauno Freiberg@raunofreiberg
Product DesignerDesigner at Vercel and author of Devouring Details, an obsessive catalogue of interface micro-craft that has quietly become required…
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Rasmus Andersson@rsms
Product DesignerDesigned Inter, so a good share of the interfaces you looked at today were set in his typeface.
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Ryo Lu@ryolu_
Product DesignerDesigns at Cursor after early stints at Notion and Stripe, working toward a world where anyone can make software.
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MDS@mds
Design EngineerRuns Shift Nudge, the interface design course a striking number of working designers quietly credit for their eye.
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Andy Allen@asallen
Design LeaderFounded Not Boring Software to put play and craft back into everyday apps, after co-founding FiftyThree and helping make Paper.
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Flora Guo@floguo
Design EngineerFounding design engineer at Paradigm, working on agentic interfaces and co-authoring the company's rebrand.
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Luis Ouriach@disco_lu
Product DesignerEx-Figma, where he unveiled Variables on the Config main stage and has been quietly hoping that isn't the career peak.
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Janum Trivedi@jmtrivedi
Design EngineerDesigner, prototyper, and engineer sitting at the OpenAI and LoveFrom intersection.
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Daniela Muntyan@daniela_muntyan
Product DesignerProduct designer on Figma's Dev Mode team, by way of Craft Docs.
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Paul Stamatiou@Stammy
Design LeaderHead of Design at Sesame after nine years drawing Twitter’s camera, composer and threads, with a stop co-founding Limitless before Meta…
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T. Costa@tcosta
Product DesignerCo-founded Fey, an investing terminal handsome enough to make finance software feel designed, and sold it to Wealthsimple.
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Maggie Appleton@Mappletons
Design EngineerStaff research engineer at GitHub Next who describes herself as 'actually a designer.' Writes hand-illustrated essays at the intersection…
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Tim Van Damme@maxvoltar
Product DesignerSoftware designer at Figma, by way of Instagram, Dropbox and Gowalla.
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Josh Puckett@joshpuckett
Design LeaderLed design at Dropbox, Wealthfront and Groupon before co-founding Iteration.
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Raphael Schaad@raphaelschaad
Product DesignerSwiss designer and MIT engineer who built Cron and sold it to Notion.
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Aakanksha Mirdha@mirdhaaakanksha
Product DesignerDesigned for Uber and Cruise before Playground AI, and now works independently as design lead for early-stage startups.
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Joshua Guo@jshguo
Product DesignerDesign engineer and V2SPACE founder building design systems, visualizations, Figma tools, and Framer components.
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Rafa el Conde@rafahari
Product DesignerDesign Engineer at Retro and longtime designer-maker of small, joyful apps.
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John Pham@JohnPhamous
Design EngineerAt Vercel by day and an angel investor the rest of the time, working out of Seattle.
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Steve Lauda@stevelauda_
Design LeaderRuns Blissful Studio, doing full-stack design and development for early-stage companies from Singapore.
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Stephen Haney@stephenhaney
Design EngineerCEO of Paper, where the canvas is real HTML and CSS instead of a picture of it.
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Mariana Castilho@mrncst
Product DesignerDoes software design and code at poolside, previously Vercel, v0, and Pierre.
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Daniel Destefanis@daniel__designs
Product DesignerProduct designer at Anthropic by way of Figma and Discord, working out of Chicago.
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Mery Kaftar@merycodes
Design EngineerDesign engineer at Vercel who redesigned the dashboard navigation everyone's been resizing since February.
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Lee Black@mrblackstudio
Design LeaderDüsseldorf designer with 25-plus years in the work, running 1042 Studio and a small constellation of tools, components, guidelines, and…
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Darshan Gajara@WeirdoWizard
Product DesignerBerlin-and-Mumbai designer and maker behind Product Disrupt, With a View, and Beanpresso.
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Derek Briggs@PixelJanitor
Design EngineerDesign and code at Shopify, previously Clerk, and an angel investor on the side.
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Beni Issen@ben_issen
Product DesignerFounding designer at Rox, and a self-described designer of machines — which is a more honest job title than most of the ones on this bench.
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Rachel How@rachelhxw
Product DesignerDesigner and builder making tech feel more human, with 270,000 YouTube subscribers watching her do it — many times the audience she has…
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Dmytro@pqoqubbw
Design EngineerDesign engineer at Mintlify creating polished interface systems and teaching the invisible details that make products feel right.
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Nev Flynn@NevFlynn
Design LeaderLeads design and engineering at ElevenLabs, by way of Evervault, whose site designers kept reverse-engineering rather than just asking him…
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Vincent van der Meulen@vinvan
Design EngineerDutch-born design engineer and Mainframe co-founder turning agent work into watchable video recaps.
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Joe Bell@joebell_
Design EngineerDesign engineer at Operate, where the job title he lists is defence against the dark arts.
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Charlie Deets@charliedeets
Product DesignerDesigns Dia at The Browser Company, having come through Apple, WhatsApp and Facebook first.
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Jaytel@Jaytel
Product DesignerDesign Studio at Shopify, after co-founding a company Shopify bought and doing design at Apple before that.
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Zeh Fernandes@zehf
Design EngineerHands-on head of design at Resend, and four World Cups deep into turning match data into generative posters — chrono-grids, brush strokes…
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Pauline Wee@pau_wee_
Product DesignerNew York designer-engineer and host of New Interfaces, a show about the people shaping how humans and computers meet.
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Roman Tesliuk@RomaTesla
Product DesignerDesigns at ElevenLabs out of Berlin and apparently cannot stop shipping side projects: Daily Dispatch, Portal, App Stacks, and Droppable at…
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Yann-Edern Gillet@yannglt
Product DesignerSoftware designer at Linear in Paris, shaping product UI, systems, and developer experience.
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George Hastings@soulegit
Design LeaderDesign engineer with fourteen-plus years across product and agency work at IDEO and AREA 17, now building Unicorn Studio and the color tool…
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Justin Rands@jayrizpop
Brand DesignerBrand engineer at Clay, previously Intercom, Oyster, and Blend.
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The Undesigner@ninepixelgrid
Brand DesignerFull-stack designer who made the PostHog website and works with Watilo.
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Matt Sellers@msllrs
Product DesignerTwenty years deep in design systems and custom iconography, now doing interface work at Lovable and Reshaped.
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Eugene Fedorenko@efedorenko
Product DesignerWrites Figmalion, the newsletter an alarming number of designers use as their actual Figma release notes.
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Liam Matteson@liammatteson
Product DesignerDesign lead at Browserbase building Director, after product work at Copilot Money, Vanta, Upperstudy, and Halftone Digital.
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Kyle Zantos@kylezantos
Design EngineerDesigner, builder and self-described agentic engineer out of Seattle, shipping under the banner of software as a gift.
