Design Engineer

Serval • San Francisco, CA

8d

About The Position

Enterprise operations — IT, HR, Finance, Legal — deserves software that's as powerful as it is pleasurable to use. As Serval's first Design Engineer, you are first and foremost a great frontend engineer — someone who's exceptional at React, ships fast, and genuinely cares about UI quality and design craft. You know what quality looks like, and you know when to chase it and when to move fast instead. That judgment — knowing when precision matters and when speed does — is core to how we build at Serval. You'll work directly with design and engineering to raise the standard of what shipped software looks and feels like — closing the gap between design intent and production, and pushing the quality of every interaction further than engineering alone would take it.

Requirements

• 4+ years of experience as a frontend engineer with a strong design background — you care deeply about craft and it shows in your work.
• Deep proficiency in React and TypeScript — you write clean, scalable, production-grade front-end code.
• Fluency in Figma — you can read, inspect, and implement designs with precision, moving fluidly between the design file and the codebase.
• A sharp eye for typography, spacing, motion, and visual hierarchy — you notice when something is off and you fix it.
• Strong command of animation and interaction principles — you know when motion adds clarity and when it gets in the way, and you can implement both with CSS, Framer Motion, or equivalent.
• Experience building and maintaining design systems or component libraries used across a product.
• The judgment to navigate tradeoffs between quality and speed — knowing which one the moment calls for and making the right call.
• Comfort with ambiguity and zero-to-one product development — you can navigate ambiguous direction and execute with conviction.

Nice To Haves

• A portfolio or examples of shipped work — not required, but great candidates often have something to show, whether that's a side project, open source contribution, or motion-heavy UI.
• Experience with AI-assisted design or code generation tools (v0, Cursor, Locofy, or similar).
• Some backend exposure — enough to understand how data flows through the systems your UI sits on top of.
• Familiarity with the rest of our stack is a plus: Go, Temporal, Postgres, Kubernetes, AWS.
• Background in enterprise or B2B SaaS products — you understand the unique needs of business users.
• Early-stage startup experience, ideally as a founding or early engineer.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate closely with our Product Designer, frontend engineers, and founders to translate Figma designs into production-ready React and TypeScript with exact fidelity — no drift, no approximation.
• Own and evolve Serval's design system implementation, building a shared component library that serves as the single source of truth for both design and engineering.
• Leverage AI-assisted workflows to accelerate the design-to-code pipeline — reducing cycles, catching inconsistencies early, and keeping design and implementation in perpetual lockstep.
• Build and refine the Serval product experience. Know when to move fast and rough to validate an idea, and when to slow down and engineer it precisely — and have the judgment to tell the difference.
• Design and implement motion and micro-interactions that bring the product to life — transitions, state changes, loading patterns, and feedback loops that make complex agent workflows feel responsive and alive.
• Maintain visual and interaction consistency across every product surface, from core workflows to edge cases.
• Raise the bar for front-end craft across the engineering team, establishing standards for component architecture, accessibility, and interaction quality.

Benefits

• Impact : Be a key player in shaping the success of our product and company.
• Growth : Build a fundamentally new AI product offering with the support of our experienced team and investors. Grow rapidly with the company.
• Culture : Join a culture that values innovation, ownership, accountability, and fun.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed