Senior Product Design Engineer
First seen by Alion on Sep 18, 2026.
Roles & Responsibilities:
- Design and build UI in the same motion - prototyping novel AI-native interactions directly in code rather than in Figma-then-handoff.
- 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.
- Own the design system - the components, patterns, and code.
- Define how design work becomes a shipped interface for everyone else on the team.
- Set standards and guardrails to ensure code generated with AI tools is production-ready, not bloated.
- Help other designers close the gap between design and frontend-ready code.
Ideal Candidate:
- Strong Product Design Engineer Profile: Combines strong product design with hands-on frontend coding.
- Must have 2+ years in product design, with strong depth in dense, complex product interfaces (tables, forms, permissions, multi-role flows) built for real users.
- Must have strong product / visual design judgment along with the ability to ship production-ready frontend code independently.
- Must have hands-on frontend engineering (React / HTML / CSS / GitHub), able to work directly in a production codebase and write clean, production-ready code.
- Must be able to set guardrails and standards so AI tools generate clean, production-ready, accessible code that follows the component system.
- Must share a GitHub profile and a link to a real product prototype they designed and coded end-to-end.
- Must have excellent English communication and be able to clearly articulate their thought process (works with US stakeholders).
- B2B SaaS background (dense tables / data); early stage startups where design and engineering were not separate functions will also work.
- Designer-first, engineer-second, with titles like Product Designer, Design Engineer, Design Builder, or Design Technologist.
- Experience with AI-native interfaces (streaming output, agentic / human-in-the-loop UX, confidence / uncertainty in UI); AI used structurally in shipping features.
Skills
Product Design, HTML, CSS, UI Design, UX