Table of Contents
Table of Contents
People trying to figure out what a Design Engineer is and want to see tangible examples of design engineering work.
Design Engineer is the latest label we’re chucking onto the pile of obfuscatory design titles alongside interface designer, interaction designer, software designer, web designer, product designer, design systems architect, UI/UX designer, UX engineer, UI engineer, and front-of-the-front-end engineer.
I won’t walk you through what defines and distinguishes each of these, because I don’t fully understand most of them. Few people do. They’re fuzzy, malleable pointers to a wide array of skills and responsibilities that differ from company to company. But they’re our best attempt at describing emerging roles in the very young field of software creation.
Throwing this extra label onto the pile feels necessary though. Design engineer captures something simple, important, and worth distinguishing: a person who sits squarely at the intersection of design and engineering, and works to bridge the gap between them.
They’re people who know how to run a design process to decide how something should work, look, and feel, and have the engineering chops to implement it. They can quickly iterate on ideas by cycling between design exploration, research, and live code. The skillset is ideal for prototyping, exploratory interaction design, and building robust design systems.
Others have written about the role in more detail, so I’ll lean on their insights to flesh out the definition:
“Design Engineering is a true blend of two conventional roles. [They] have deep knowledge in technological systems while scaling interface quality. They naturally fit in design crit or reviewing code with engineering.”
“They are able to contribute wireframes and mockups as well as front-end code. Prototyping at all levels of fidelity, whether via pen-and-paper sketch or live code, lets design engineers quickly grow their idea and shepherd it through the development process.”
“A design engineer might focus on setting up a design system, documenting patterns, performing workflow audits and updates, building UI components, writing usage documentation, or working with stakeholders spread across an organization.”
“From prototyping to production-ready code, this function fast-tracks design decisions, mitigates risk, and establishes UI code quality”
“They can bridge the chasm of design to browser engineering, skipping the need for 60+ artifacts. How? They have an understanding of the constraints of the medium, so from sketches to wireframe to high fidelity mocks, they only have to produce one or two artifacts while simultaneously keeping a picture in their head of how the elements of those designs flex and flow and change across different sizes. They can imagine how it works, so they don’t have to articulate it for every iteration. There’s no need to explicitly design and document all possible states for whoever is downstream of the designs because they are the ones downstream of the designs.”
“The role I’ve been trying to push towards without realising:
- Idea validation
- Rapid prototyping
- Production code
- UI code quality
- Creating useful tools
- Encapsulating systems
- Setting up project groundwork
- Empowering effective collaboration”
Rather than dwell too long on the definitions and literature, I’m more interested in practical examples of design engineering work out in the wild. Selfishly, I’m trying to figure out whether I’m a design engineer, or want to become one when I grow up. I probably count as a hobbyist design engineer, but not a professionally-employable-capital-D-Design-Engineer. And it’s unlikely I’ll ever grow up.
The best way to do this is to find and follow people doing design engineering work in public, and pay attention to their outputs, skills, and responsibilities.
Over the last year or two, I’ve seen an increasing numbers of these folks pop up. Most 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.
So here’s my list of people I consider design engineers, based on the work they put in public. Some of these people don’t explicitly call themselves “design engineers,” but their work sits solidly at the intersection of the two disciplines. It’s not exhaustive or comprehensive. I am not listing all design engineers known to the universe. Only the ones I pay attention to and respect the work of. Maybe it’ll help you figure out what design engineers are too.
1. Rauno Freiberg
2. Paco Coursey
3. Szymon Kaliski
4. Amelia Wattenberger
5. Andy Allen
6. Alex Obenauer
7. Bret Victor
8. Emil Kowalski
9. Steve Ruiz
10. Bartosz Ciechanowski
Some caveats
I’ve intentionally only listed people who put lots of work in public. But the work people put in public is not necessarily the work they do day-to-day.
People are incentivised to only share their sexy, shiny, flawless creations, rather than their messy process or shameful failures. Some of the especially tedious and labourious work isn’t easily shareable, such as advocating for robust design systems and cleaning up legacy code.
I am not under any illusions that these public works constitute the entirety of what design engineers create or spend all day making. I’m sure some spend their days “aligning stakeholders,” buried under a mountain of strategic documents and trapped by heirarchical approval chains. Say a small prayer for them.
If you’re mortally offended that I didn’t include someone who you think is the definition of a design engineer, tweet at me and include examples of their work. It’s not helpful to send me people who don’t work in public. 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.