Design Engineer

Restate (restate.dev http://restate.dev) is a lightweight runtime that turns AI agents, workflows, and backend services into durable processes - so teams can focus on their logic, not failure mechanics. The role: We're looking for a Design Engineer to own the core Restate UI, design and code. Our UI is where developers end up when something is running, stuck, or has already gone wrong. It's a live window onto a distributed system that keeps moving while you're looking at it. The data is large, it changes under you, and the person reading it is usually in a hurry. Developers already like Restate for making something technically complex feel simple. Holding that as the product grows is the job, and you'd hold it end to end: the design decisions and the code that ships them. THE OPPORTUNITY Front-row seat to the biggest infra shift in decades Durable runtimes like Restate are becoming the next foundational infrastructure component - and increasingly a critical piece for AI applications. As systems become more agentic, long-running, integration-heavy, and failure-prone, durable execution turns reliability from a bespoke engineering tax into a default property. In this role, you’re not watching that shift from the sidelines - you help build the platform that enables it. State-of-the-art tech, built from first principles Restate re-imagines durable execution as a lightweight self-contained stack - no database required - and ships as a single Rust binary with an optimized custom storage layer, low latency orchestration, and an analytics engine for observability. Enterprise Traction Restate is already used by Fortune 500 companies, including Tier 1 banks running critical financial workflows, and also by cutting-edge AI and infra startups pushing the boundary of what “production-grade agents” mean. You’ll work on problems where reliability, correctness, and operational simplicity are existential. Work with world-class engineers You’ll partner directly with engineers who’ve built and operated foundational systems at scale - creators of Apache Flink, and leaders from Meta’s messaging infrastructure. You’ll have the chance to work with incredibly talented individuals who care deeply about their craft. WHAT YOU’LL DO We want to hire a great Design Engineer to ensure a stellar developer experience across the core Restate UI and adjacent parts of the product. The scope includes but is not limited to: - Architect, design and ship the core Restate UI: from whiteboarding sessions with engineers to production-ready code. - Show what the system is actually doing: execution timelines, retries, queues, state, failures. People come to the UI to work out what happened, often while something is on fire, and it has to get them there quickly. - Build for data at scale: large result sets, live updates, filtering and search that hold up, and the charts and timelines that sit on top of them. - Design the states nobody designs: loading, empty, partial, error, one result and far too many. A developer tool is won or lost in those, and they're usually the ones that get skipped. - Keep it fast: Restate is a low latency runtime and the UI should feel like one. Rendering cost, data loading and perceived latency are design decisions here, not a cleanup pass at the end. - Keep one mental model: developers meet the same concepts in the UI, the SDKs and the docs. They should be named and presented the same way wherever someone runs into them. - Bring durable execution to life visually: the current Restate product is loved for its simplicity in breaking down a technically complex product. You'll make sure we keep shipping at the same design bar. - Build scalable design systems in code: reusable components and patterns for architecture, code, and interactive elements that others can benefit from. WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR The profile We’re looking for a design engineer with strong opinions and a portfolio that backs them up, with work you’ve both designed and built. You should be comfortable operating with significant autonomy, working directly with the founding team, and pushing back when the team is wrong. Must-haves: - Production front-end skills. React, TypeScript, and modern HTML/CSS. You can take a feature from concept through to shipped and deployed yourself, without waiting on an engineer. - A portfolio of shipped work, where we can see both the craft and the code behind it. - Strong design sensibility. A high visual bar you can hold across the whole product, without waiting for someone to set the direction first. - Information design. Turning a lot of data into something a person can read quickly. Hierarchy, density, progressive disclosure, and knowing what to leave out. - Data-intensive interfaces. Datasets bigger than the viewport. Pagination, virtualization, filtering, search, and charts built on real data rather than a tidy sample. - Front-end performance. You've profiled and fixed slow rendering, long lists, wasted re-renders, bundle size. Ideally you can point at numbers either side of the fix. - Visual storytelling for technical concepts. Show us how you've made something complex feel obvious. - Motion design ability, built in code. Motion as a way to communicate state, time, and dynamism. - Design systems in code. Components and patterns that stay coherent as other people build on them. - Reading beyond the front end. API specs, queries, backend code. You don't have to write the backend, but you should be able to read it and work out what's going on. - AI literacy. You're using AI to multiply your own impact and to unblock yourself. You're not waiting for an engineer to help you take something live. Nice-to-haves: - Prior work on a developer tools, infrastructure, or AI product. Familiarity with the developer audience and what "great" looks like in this space. - Data visualization: timelines, traces, graphs, time series with more data points than pixels. - Accessibility and keyboard-first interfaces. We're not where we'd like to be here, and we'd like the next person to care about it. - Creative development experience: 3D, generative, or game-like web work (Three.js, GLSL shaders, and the like). - Comfort reaching into the backend when a feature needs it. - Comfortable deploying and owning something serverless yourself: Cloudflare Workers, Vercel, or similar, with a working grasp of edge runtimes, caching, and cold starts. Not a fit: - You want to lead a design team rather than be the senior IC doing the work yourself. - You expect a finished design to hand off, or heavy direction. We need someone who arrives with a point of view and builds. - You’re a designer who doesn’t code, or an engineer who doesn’t sweat the visual details. This role needs both. - You’re not interested in technical subject matter. Our surface area is wide, and the role lives or dies on translating it. ENGAGEMENT, LOCATION, AND TRAVEL - Location: remote in Europe preferred; US remote for exceptional candidates - Travel: minimal; occasional team offsites.