Delightree - Senior Design Engineer

About the role

This role splits roughly in half.

The first half is designing for franchise operations - multi location brands, franchisee owners, and frontline staff each needing something different from the same product.

The second half is owning the layer between design and code. You'll own the design system - the components, patterns, and code. You'll write frontend code yourself, and you'll define how design work becomes a shipped interface for everyone else on the team.

That second half is why this role exists. Our approach to product development is shifting. Instead of traditional mockup handoffs, product managers and designers directly build working prototypes directly in code, using AI workflows alongside our component library. Engineering builds on those prototypes rather than starting over. You own this system and ensure it's up to scale and quality.

What you'll do

• Design and build UI in the same motion - prototyping novel AI-native interactions directly in code rather than in Figma-then-handoff, especially where no pattern library exists yet.

• Sit inside a pod (PM + eng lead + you) and take features from concept to shipped, rather than handing off a spec and waiting.

• Own the interaction and motion details - loading/streaming states, transitions, micro-interactions - the polish that's nearly impossible to fully spec in a doc.

• Build and maintain shared UI components so the rest of the org can move fast without reinventing patterns feature by feature.

• Work directly in the production codebase.

What we're looking for

• 4+ years in product design, with depth in dense interfaces - tables, forms, permissions, multi role flows.

• Real product/visual design judgment and the ability to ship real frontend code - not a designer who dabbles in code or an engineer who cares about UI, but someone for whom design and implementation are the same skill.

• Hands-on frontend engineering. A portfolio + GitHub showing shipped, interactive, polished products - not just mockups or case studies.

• Design systems built and maintained at scale, in code. You should be able to direct AI tools to build and maintain prototypes that adhere to accessibility, component system, and other guardrails.

• Experience or strong interest in AI-native interfaces: streaming output, agentic/human-in-the-loop UX, confidence and uncertainty in UI.

• Bonus: has worked somewhere small enough that design and engineering weren't separate functions. AI used structurally in how features got shipped, from ideation through implementation and review - not just for copy or asset generation.