Where the role lives

Vercel described its version of the role in Design Engineering at Vercel, published on 29 March 2024 and credited to Glenn Hitchcock, Henry Heffernan, John Pham, Rauno Freiberg, and Yasmin Pessoa. It opens by calling design engineer a new role that is “both confusing and exciting,” and pins its existence on expectations: what good software looks and feels like has never been held to a higher standard, and design engineers are “a core part in exceeding that expectation.” The definition is two sentences: “Design Engineers at Vercel blend aesthetic sensibility with technical skills. This allows us to deeply understand a problem, then design, build, and ship a solution autonomously.” The list of what they care about is mostly not visual: delightful interactions and affordances, reusable components and primitives, page speed, cross-browser support, inclusive input modes (touch, pointers), respecting user preferences, and access for users of assistive technology. “There is a lot of work behind the pretty pixels.”

The post is most useful on how the work is organised, because it names three workflows. In design collaboration there is no handoff: a designer “sketches the start and iterates with a Design Engineer in Figma or code to produce the final design,” and the design engineer advises on implementation cost versus impact (“some animations are unnecessary because they are not the main focus”), on whether a component is one-off or built for reuse, and prototypes the things that are easier outside Figma, since animations, keyboard controls, and touch “are better implemented in code” than rebuilt from another medium. Collaboration happens through Slack messages, screenshots, videos, preview links, and Zoom calls. In product team integration a design engineer is embedded on a feature that will take more than a month and implements the UI while the product team implements the API and infrastructure; if no designer is assigned, the design engineer makes the initial sketch and gets feedback from both sides. Independent ownership covers a user pain point that takes days to weeks: sketch in Figma or code, socialise the change, incorporate feedback, ship. Sitting in the Design team gives the group room for work that would otherwise sink in an engineering backlog, and the design-led examples are the Geist font and its glyph playground, the design system documentation, the Design Team homepage, and “delighters” in the dashboard. Two sentences carry the culture: “There’s no fixed toolset for a Design Engineer. There’s no best background,” and the role “is about shifting from owning a specific part of the product development process to owning results.” The skill list is collective rather than individual (Figma, design in code, production code, browser performance, GLSL shaders, copy, Three.js, Blender, video), and the hiring line says to apply even if you have never had the title.

Rauno Freiberg’s own description matches. “I work as a Staff Design Engineer at Vercel on our platform, design system, marketing pages, and Next.js Dev Tools. Previously, I was at The Browser Company designing and building the Arc browser.” On his home page the role is a sentence and a country: an Estonian interaction designer working with Vercel and Devouring Details. His essay What will you ship? is the role in practice. In October 2023, together with Glenn, Henry, and Alasdair, the team shipped a new Vercel homepage; the north stars were performance, constraint in visual flair, and bridging pages aesthetically, and if an animation “didn’t perform well, felt pompous, or out of rhythm relative to the page, we didn’t build it.” Four people, one page, design and code in the same hands.

Linear employs people who call themselves design engineers without listing the title. Its careers page, as of this writing, has Product Designer and Product Engineer roles and no Design Engineer, but its statement of intent is the closest thing to a job description the role has anywhere: “We believe that there is a lost art of building software. A craftsmanship that yields products of an exceptional, almost magical, quality.” That quality, it says, is difficult to describe with words and impossible to measure in numbers, “but you can feel it when it’s there,” and the company wants people “who share our passion for software craftsmanship and getting even the smallest details right.” Emil Kowalski says on his site that he works on the Web team at Linear, and on his course site that he is a design engineer there, after the design team at Vercel where he developed the design system and dashboard. Paco Coursey is “Webmaster at Linear,” having developed the Vercel design system, website, and dashboard before that; one of his posts records changing Linear’s favicon from #6E79D6 to #8299FF to fix a white background in Safari’s dark mode, which is about as concrete as the job gets. Maggie Appleton noticed the pattern in 2024: the public design engineers she follows come mostly from “a small set of companies like Vercel, Linear, The Browser Company and Replit, known for their attention to interface design detail and slick product interactions, who are clearly encouraging and cultivating design-engineer hybrids.”

Her note A Collection of Design Engineers (March 2024) offers the shortest definition in this chapter and then declines to rely on it. Design engineer is “the latest label we’re chucking onto the pile of obfuscatory design titles,” but worth adding because it captures “a person who sits squarely at the intersection of design and engineering, and works to bridge the gap between them”: someone who can run a design process to decide how something should work, look, and feel, has the engineering chops to implement it, and iterates by cycling between design exploration, research, and live code. Rather than argue about definitions she lists people who work in public, with one line each. Rauno Freiberg, Staff Design Engineer at Vercel. Paco Coursey, Webmaster at Linear, previously Software Engineer at Vercel. Szymon Kaliski, Design Engineer at Replit, previously Principal Investigator at Ink & Switch. Amelia Wattenberger, research and development at GitHub, previously designer at Adept. Andy Allen, designer and founder of Not Boring Software. Alex Obenauer, independent researcher who collaborates with Ink & Switch. Bret Victor, independent researcher and creator of Dynamicland, “much more than a design engineer” but fitting the definition anyway. Emil Kowalski, Design Engineer at Vercel at the time. Steve Ruiz, founder and designer of tldraw, previously at Framer, “master of the arrows.” Bartosz Ciechanowski, who creates interactive explanations and is “not a Design Engineer as a profession” but a good example of the blend. She counts herself a hobbyist rather than “a professionally-employable-capital-D-Design-Engineer,” and warns that public work is not day-to-day work: people share their shiny creations, not the tedious advocacy for design systems or the legacy clean-up.

Sean Voisen, who leads design engineering teams inside Adobe Design, gives the most procedural definition. In Design engineering, a working definition he lists the synonyms (UI engineer, UX engineer, design technologist, experience developer, design prototyper, creative technologist), notes that the title already means something different in other engineering industries, and dismisses “designers who code” as “semi-tautological and not particularly helpful. You can’t accurately describe the role without describing what design engineers actually do.” What they do, in his account, is three things: prototype new product experiences so designers can learn about designs and validate assumptions; build tools and infrastructure that let design operate at scale, design systems chiefly; and build the interfaces that other engineers “can’t or won’t” build while staying true to design intent. He insists the design in the title comes first for a reason (“design first, engineering second”), that the role is not web-only (native mobile, VR, AR, desktop), and that direct manipulation, where users notice dropped frames and imprecise timing immediately, is where design engineers excel. His Adobe Design piece adds that Adobe has “more than two dozen design engineers and managers who focus on high-fidelity prototyping as a discrete discipline,” that the people are deeply T-shaped, and that they used to be called, simply, “unicorns.”

The other definitional posts are shorter and disagree at the edges. Chris Coyier’s Frontend Masters post (March 2024) is the plainest: the engineer half means knowing the tech (HTML, CSS, JavaScript), the design half means building and refining the look and experience, and he would not mind “Web Design Engineer” as the official form, to keep it apart from mechanical engineering. Trys Mudford, who found the name in 2021 in the Design Engineering Handbook, says “CSS is the primary language of the design engineer” and describes the gulf organisations create when they jump straight from design to engineering, across which “a huge wealth of design intention can disappear out of sight.” Jeremy Keith, responding the same week, admitted he is not a fan of calling people engineers who are not qualified engineers, “but I accept that that particular ship has sailed,” and imagined the title with levels, a head of design engineering who perhaps never writes code. Rune Madsen, in The Gulf Between Design and Engineering, is not writing about the title at all and supplies the diagnosis the others share: the design handover, “this supposedly magic moment where design has finished and engineering begins,” is the root cause of most collaboration problems, and code, not the Figma file, is the real design product.

David Luhr traced where the term came from in The origins of design engineering (February 2024). In January 2019 Chris Coyier’s “The Great Divide” surveyed the gap between design and engineering; that autumn Natalya Shelburne gave the Beyond Tellerrand talk “CSS at the intersection,” the earliest design engineering resource Luhr found (“Roles are arbitrary things we decided”). In 2020 Shelburne, Adekunle Oduye, Kim Williams, and Eddie Lou wrote the Design Engineering Handbook, published by Design Better Co.; Lou had formed a design engineering team at Indeed, one of the earliest Luhr could find; and Shelburne said on Shop Talk Show that she came up with the term with Aarron Walter at Design Exchange in Sydney. In February 2021 Brad Frost coined front-of-the-front-end, Mudford’s series followed a day later, Keith responded, and a Clearleft podcast that September featured Tobias Ahlin, a design engineer at GitHub. In 2022 Jim Nielsen made the case; in 2023 Luhr started noticing job listings with the title; in early 2024 he saw a significant increase. His close is cautious: “It’s uncertain whether design engineering will last as a title, but any momentum that further legitimizes this valuable role is worth supporting.” The Handbook’s own sentence, quoted by Mudford, is the one most later definitions descend from: design engineering is the discipline that “finesses the overlap between design and engineering to speed delivery and idea validation.”

Lay the definitions side by side and the agreement is larger than the vocabulary suggests. Everyone puts the person at the intersection and gives them a gap to bridge. Everyone ties the role to autonomy and to owning an outcome rather than a slice of process: Vercel’s “owning results,” Kathryn’s “full ownership of what we shipped.” Everyone puts the work in the medium of delivery, and nobody defines it by a tool: Kathryn refuses the React-or-Figma test, Vercel says there is no fixed toolset, Maggie lists people rather than skills. The differences are about emphasis and address. Voisen puts design first and the role in service of design; Vercel houses it in the Design team but describes shipping product features; Kathryn says it clusters in infrastructure teams at large companies; Maggie’s roster is mostly small companies and independents; Coyier keeps it on the web while Voisen explicitly does not; Linear cultivates the people without using the word. Take from this that the title will vary from company to company, that the workflow (no handoff, prototype in code, own the result) is what to look for in a job description, and that when a company says Product Engineer or Webmaster the work may be identical.