# The attributes of a design engineer · The career Kathryn Gonzalez joined DoorDash in 2015 as its first full-time product designer and frontend engineer, when it was “only a handful of us working out of an old Animal Hospital in Palo Alto.” She led product design, started DoorDash Drive, led frontend engineering, then spent six years building the Design Infrastructure org (design systems, design engineering, prototyping, accessibility), ending as a manager of managers over twenty-five people. She [left in January 2023](https://www.ryngonzalez.com/blog/goodbye-doordash) and a year later published [The Attributes of a Design Engineer](https://www.ryngonzalez.com/blog/the-attributes-of-a-design-engineer), “My definition of design engineering after building the practice at DoorDash.” A photo in it marks 2017, when she officially became a design engineer there: “CEO approved!” ### Outcomes, not tools The post opens on “Design Engineering seems to be having a moment” (Vercel had just published its account, David Hoang had written about the decade ahead) and deflates the novelty: creative technologists, Flash developers, design technologists, and UX engineers were the same role with different tools. Then it refuses the usual test: “are they a designer who knows how to sling some React? Or are they an engineer that has an eye for design and is comfortable in Figma?” She defines it by outcomes. **Design engineering** (Kathryn Gonzalez's definition: living at the intersection of design and engineering, and using a broad understanding of both sides to build with significant autonomy, practice and teach great software craft, and elevate the final fidelity of what is made from start to end.) is living at the intersection of both practices and using a broad understanding of each to **build with significant autonomy** (The first of Kathryn Gonzalez's three attributes: taking full ownership of what ships, the outcome rather than the design deliverable, and acting as an owner end to end.), **practice and teach great software craft** (The second attribute: an obsession with the materials of software and the affordances of the medium, paired with helping others understand them.), and **elevate the final fidelity of what’s made** (The third attribute: using the fact that much of the process of building software can live in one person to raise the fidelity of what ships, directly and through infrastructure that raises everyone else's.). Those three fit design systems roles, prototyping roles, and product roles with craft at the core. She has held all three. ### Autonomy: own what ships The autonomy story is an origin story, told honestly. “In truth, it started because they hired me as their first product designer, and quickly, I made it known that I didn’t see the scope of my role being just a person who lived in Sketch (pre-Figma).” Her responsibility was “the full ownership of what we shipped,” the outcome, not the deliverable. DoorDash had no full-time product designers or frontend engineers, so she filled both gaps: the internal menu editor, the web consumer site, and the first Merchant tools, end to end. The DoorDash.com of 2017 was hers. Startups, she concludes, want owners end to end, and design engineers are that mindset as a practice. ### Craft: the materials of software “Great design engineers are obsessed with understanding the materials of software, all the specific affordances of the medium, and the tools you use to shape them.” She calls them “software makers,” and the tell is what they learn: tools others find too intimidating (shaders, 3D materials, physics-based animations) or too wasteful for anyone shipping anything that worked “but not the right thing executed exceptionally well.” Her examples: micro-interactions prototyped in Principle, Framer, and code; in 2015, migrating DoorDash’s Backbone, vanilla JS, and Angular 1 to React. The teaching half followed. She had learned at Fetchnotes how hard a fluid web-stack mobile app is, shared that with the full-stack engineers, and helped hire frontend engineers with the same attention to detail. Source The three attributes are the section headings of The Attributes of a Design Engineer (April 2024). The DoorDash timeline is from her home page, Goodbye, DoorDash, and her Config 2023 talk intro. ### Fidelity: where the role lives “One of the unique aspects of design engineering is that you’ve got the potential to have much of the full process of building software contained in one person.” Her favourite projects were explorations no static design could express: “Selling a vision to customers, or other people in your company, sometimes requires a magic trick.” The same skill builds infrastructure that raises everyone else’s fidelity, which is why design engineers cluster at large companies on infrastructure and systems teams. “We were a leading system by the time I left.” In a [2020 interview](https://www.ryngonzalez.com/blog/design-leadership-interview-at-doordash) she wanted hires “really strong at bridging the gap between design and engineering”; the open iOS Design Technologist role had to know UIKit’s pain points and “love and appreciate the craftsmanship in building UIs.” Her 2018 post [Design Systems and Infrastructure](https://www.ryngonzalez.com/blog/design-systems-and-infrastructure) framed the goal as “a home where people who love both design and engineering can use their skills” and defined **design infrastructure** (Kathryn Gonzalez's name for the function at the intersection of product design and engineering that supports both sides through tools, systems, communication, and shared empathy.) as supporting both sides “through our tools, systems, communication and most importantly, our shared empathy of design and engineering.” The close: “Design engineering is not just a designer who codes or an engineer who has an eye for design and the courage to edit a Figma file.” It brings an organisation “better software, more truthfully expressed.” Footnotes promise posts on design engineers as founders and on why the career “can be precarious,” and a [travel essay](https://www.ryngonzalez.com/blog/how-do-you-want-to-live) wonders whether she could “again be the one that coded and designed the thing.” None of the attributes is a tool, so practise them now: own an outcome, learn the material well enough to teach it, find where higher fidelity would change a decision. The title came two years after the behaviour.