# Where the role lives · The career ### Vercel: three workflows, no handoff [Design Engineering at Vercel](https://vercel.com/blog/design-engineering-at-vercel) (29 March 2024; Glenn Hitchcock, Henry Heffernan, John Pham, Rauno Freiberg, Yasmin Pessoa) calls the role “both confusing and exciting” and defines it in 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.” What they care about is mostly not visual (“There is a lot of work behind the pretty pixels”): - Delightful user interactions and affordances - Building reusable components/primitives - Page speed - Cross-browser support - Support for inclusive input modes (touch, pointers, etc.) - Respecting user preferences - Accessible to users of assistive technology Three workflows. Design collaboration has no handoff: a designer “sketches the start and iterates with a Design Engineer in Figma or code,” who weighs cost against impact (“some animations are unnecessary because they are not the main focus”), decides one-off versus reusable, and prototypes animations, keyboard controls, and touch, which “are better implemented in code.” Product team integration embeds a design engineer on a feature taking more than a month to build the UI while the team builds the API. Independent ownership is a pain point fixed in days to weeks: sketch, socialise, ship. Sitting in Design makes room for work an engineering backlog would sink: the Geist font and glyph playground, the design system docs, the Design Team homepage, dashboard “delighters.” “There’s no fixed toolset for a Design Engineer. There’s no best background,” the skill list (Figma, code, browser performance, GLSL, copy, Three.js, Blender, video) is collective, and the role “is about shifting from owning a specific part of the product development process to owning results.” [Rauno Freiberg](https://rauno.me), Staff Design Engineer there (previously Arc at The Browser Company), shows it in [What will you ship?](https://rauno.me/craft/vercel): in October 2023 four people shipped a new homepage, and if an animation “didn’t perform well, felt pompous, or out of rhythm relative to the page, we didn’t build it.” ### Linear and the public roster Linear employs design engineers without listing the title. Its [careers page](https://linear.app/careers) has Product Designer and Product Engineer roles, but its statement of intent is the closest thing the role has to a job description: “We believe that there is a lost art of building software. A craftsmanship that yields products of an exceptional, almost magical, quality,” unmeasurable “but you can feel it when it’s there.” [Emil Kowalski](https://emilkowal.ski) is on its Web team and [Paco Coursey](https://paco.me) is “Webmaster at Linear,” both after Vercel; one of Paco’s [posts](https://paco.me/writing/safari-favicon-showing-white-background) records changing Linear’s favicon from #6E79D6 to #8299FF to fix a white background in Safari’s dark mode. Maggie Appleton noticed that public design engineers come mostly from “a small set of companies like Vercel, Linear, The Browser Company and Replit.” Her [A Collection of Design Engineers](https://maggieappleton.com/design-engineers) (March 2024) calls the title “the latest label we’re chucking onto the pile of obfuscatory design titles,” worth it because it names “a person who sits squarely at the intersection of design and engineering, and works to bridge the gap between them.” Then she lists people: Rauno Freiberg (Vercel), Paco Coursey (Linear), Szymon Kaliski (Replit), Amelia Wattenberger (GitHub), Andy Allen (Not Boring Software), Alex Obenauer, Bret Victor (“much more than a design engineer”), Emil Kowalski (then Vercel), Steve Ruiz (tldraw, “master of the arrows”), and Bartosz Ciechanowski, “not a Design Engineer as a profession” but a good example of the blend. She counts herself a hobbyist and warns that public work is not day-to-day work: shiny creations, not design-system advocacy. Aside The list is public-only on purpose. “I’m sure there are a thousand and one exceptional design engineers buried in the basement of Apple, but we’ll never get to see their work or learn from them.” ### Definitions that disagree at the edges Sean Voisen, who leads design engineering teams inside Adobe Design, is the most procedural in [Design engineering, a working definition](https://sean.voisen.org/writing/design-engineering-working-definition). He lists the synonyms (UI engineer, UX engineer, design technologist, experience developer, design prototyper, creative technologist), dismisses “designers who code” as “semi-tautological and not particularly helpful,” and names three jobs: prototype so designers can validate assumptions; build tools and design systems; build the interfaces other engineers “can’t or won’t.” The role is “design first, engineering second,” not web-only, and strongest in direct manipulation, where dropped frames show at once. His [Adobe Design piece](https://adobe.design/stories/leading-design/should-you-pursue-a-career-in-design-engineering) counts “more than two dozen design engineers and managers” doing high-fidelity prototyping as a discipline, deeply **T-shaped** (Adobe Design's description of design engineers: a broad understanding of design paired with deep technical know-how in user interface engineering practices like rendering, animation, and layout.), once called “unicorns.” Chris Coyier’s [post](https://frontendmasters.com/blog/design-engineers/) (March 2024) is plainest: engineer means HTML, CSS, JavaScript; design means look and experience; “Web Design Engineer” would keep it apart from mechanical engineering. Trys Mudford, who [found the name in 2021](https://www.trysmudford.com/blog/i-think-im-a-design-engineer/), says “CSS is the primary language of the design engineer” and names the gulf where “a huge wealth of design intention can disappear out of sight.” Jeremy Keith, [the same week](https://adactio.com/journal/17838), dislikes calling unqualified people engineers “but I accept that that particular ship has sailed.” Rune Madsen’s [The Gulf Between Design and Engineering](https://designsystems.international/ideas/the-gulf-between-design-and-engineering/) supplies the shared diagnosis: the **design handover** (Rune Madsen's name for the supposedly magic moment where design has finished and engineering begins, which he calls the root cause of many collaboration problems on product teams.), “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. ### Where the term came from David Luhr traced it in [The origins of design engineering](https://luhr.co/blog/2024/02/26/the-origins-of-design-engineering/) (February 2024). January 2019, Chris Coyier’s “The Great Divide”; autumn 2019, Natalya Shelburne’s “CSS at the intersection” (“Roles are arbitrary things we decided”); 2020, Shelburne, Adekunle Oduye, Kim Williams, and Eddie Lou write the [Design Engineering Handbook](https://marketing.invisionapp-cdn.com/www-assets.invisionapp.com/epubs/InVision_DesignEngineeringHandbook.pdf), Lou having formed one of the earliest teams at Indeed and Shelburne having coined the term with Aarron Walter in Sydney; February 2021, Brad Frost coins **front-of-the-front-end** (Brad Frost's term, via Jeremy Keith, for a web developer who specialises in HTML, CSS, and presentational JavaScript, as opposed to the back-of-the-front-end developer who writes the JavaScript that makes an application function.), Mudford follows a day later, Keith responds, and a Clearleft podcast features Tobias Ahlin of GitHub; 2022, Jim Nielsen makes the case; 2023, job listings; early 2024, a significant increase. The Handbook’s sentence is the ancestor: the discipline that “finesses the overlap between design and engineering to speed delivery and idea validation.” Side by side, the agreement outweighs the vocabulary: everyone puts the person at the intersection, ties the role to owning an outcome (“owning results,” “full ownership of what we shipped”), and refuses to define it by a tool. The differences are emphasis: Voisen serves design, Vercel ships product from the Design team, Kathryn finds it in infrastructure teams, Coyier keeps it on the web. So look for the workflow (no handoff, prototype in code, own the result); Product Engineer or Webmaster may mean the same work.