Design Engineer
About you
You’re a product designer who likes to build.
You have exceptional product and interaction design instincts, a strong visual eye, and enough engineering ability to take ideas into working prototypes and production. You care about how software feels in use: interactions, motion, responsiveness, details, edge cases and all the small decisions that turn a functional product into a great one.
You’ve designed and shipped ambitious digital products, ideally across high-quality product teams, startups or creative technology companies. You have a portfolio of work that demonstrates excellent craft and meaningful ownership. You have strong taste and an instinct for where product design is going, rather than simply following established patterns and trends.
You’re comfortable working in code, particularly on the web, and aren’t afraid to roll up your sleeves, dive into the codebase and make changes yourself. We’re looking for someone whose centre of gravity is design, who can work directly with engineers and use code as another design tool.
You enjoy ambiguity, experimentation and exploring ideas that may or may not become products.
The role
You’ll work across tldraw’s products and experiments, including tldraw.com, tldraw offline, our SDK and new product bets.
You’ll work closely with product engineers and the wider product team to explore ideas, prototype them quickly, develop the interaction model, and carry the best ones through to something we can ship.
Key responsibilities include:
Own the design of products and features across tldraw.com, tldraw offline, our SDK and new product bets, gathering feedback and iterating as they evolve
Take ambiguous product ideas from rough concepts through prototypes, interaction design and polished experiences
Build high-fidelity prototypes in code when that is the fastest or best way to explore an idea
Work directly with engineers to turn designs into exceptional production experiences
Sweat the details across interaction, motion, typography, layout, responsiveness and overall product feel
Contribute to the evolution and consistency of our design language across products
Explore unconventional interfaces and interaction patterns, particularly around canvas, creative tools and AI
Make experimental things: demos, prototypes, side projects and ideas that help us discover what tldraw should build next
You should have
A strong track record in product, interaction or digital design
A strong portfolio showing exceptional product craft and substantial personal contribution to shipped products
Experience working on sophisticated interactive software, not only marketing websites or static interfaces
Excellent visual, interaction and product design judgement
Experience prototyping ideas and iterating rapidly based on what you learn
Enough frontend development experience to work directly in modern web technologies and turn designs into functioning experiences
Familiarity with React, TypeScript, HTML and CSS, or the ability to become productive with them quickly
Experience collaborating closely with engineers and understanding the realities of building production software
High agency and comfort working on loosely defined problems without waiting for a complete specification
Clear communication skills and an ability to explain the reasoning behind your design decisions
Based in or willing to relocate to London and able to work regularly from our office
We’d love, but don’t require
Experience designing for canvas, spatial, multiplayer or agent interactions
Strong motion, animation or prototyping skills
Experience building side projects, tools or products of your own
Contributions to open-source projects or communities
Experience working across both consumer-facing products and tools for professional or developer audiences
What you’ll get
Competitive salary + equity options
Hybrid working from our London office
25 paid days holiday + UK public holidays
Private health insurance
Pension contribution
Income replacement & employee assistance programmes
Equipment allowance + great tech stack
The opportunity to shape not just how tldraw’s products look, but what we build next
About tldraw
tldraw is a London-based Series A startup building tools for infinite canvas and creative collaboration.
Our open-source canvas SDK powers products built by developers around the world, while tldraw.com gives us a place to explore what the medium itself can become.
We’re now experimenting with a broader product suite: evolving our existing products, exploring new applications built on top of tldraw, and making bets on new ways for people to create, think and work with computers.
We like building things, putting them in front of people and seeing what happens. We care deeply about craft, creative tooling and making software that feels genuinely new.