Design Engineer

About you

You’re a product designer who likes to build.

You have exceptional product and interaction design instincts, a strong visual eye, and enough engineering ability to take ideas into working prototypes and production. You care about how software feels in use: interactions, motion, responsiveness, details, edge cases and all the small decisions that turn a functional product into a great one.

You’ve designed and shipped ambitious digital products, ideally across high-quality product teams, startups or creative technology companies. You have a portfolio of work that demonstrates excellent craft and meaningful ownership. You have strong taste and an instinct for where product design is going, rather than simply following established patterns and trends.

You’re comfortable working in code, particularly on the web, and aren’t afraid to roll up your sleeves, dive into the codebase and make changes yourself. We’re looking for someone whose centre of gravity is design, who can work directly with engineers and use code as another design tool.

You enjoy ambiguity, experimentation and exploring ideas that may or may not become products.

The role

You’ll work across tldraw’s products and experiments, including tldraw.com, tldraw offline, our SDK and new product bets.

You’ll work closely with product engineers and the wider product team to explore ideas, prototype them quickly, develop the interaction model, and carry the best ones through to something we can ship.

Key responsibilities include:

• Own the design of products and features across tldraw.com, tldraw offline, our SDK and new product bets, gathering feedback and iterating as they evolve
• Take ambiguous product ideas from rough concepts through prototypes, interaction design and polished experiences
• Build high-fidelity prototypes in code when that is the fastest or best way to explore an idea
• Work directly with engineers to turn designs into exceptional production experiences
• Sweat the details across interaction, motion, typography, layout, responsiveness and overall product feel
• Contribute to the evolution and consistency of our design language across products
• Explore unconventional interfaces and interaction patterns, particularly around canvas, creative tools and AI
• Make experimental things: demos, prototypes, side projects and ideas that help us discover what tldraw should build next

You should have

• A strong track record in product, interaction or digital design
• A strong portfolio showing exceptional product craft and substantial personal contribution to shipped products
• Experience working on sophisticated interactive software, not only marketing websites or static interfaces
• Excellent visual, interaction and product design judgement
• Experience prototyping ideas and iterating rapidly based on what you learn
• Enough frontend development experience to work directly in modern web technologies and turn designs into functioning experiences
• Familiarity with React, TypeScript, HTML and CSS, or the ability to become productive with them quickly
• Experience collaborating closely with engineers and understanding the realities of building production software
• High agency and comfort working on loosely defined problems without waiting for a complete specification
• Clear communication skills and an ability to explain the reasoning behind your design decisions
• Based in or willing to relocate to London and able to work regularly from our office

We’d love, but don’t require

• Experience designing for canvas, spatial, multiplayer or agent interactions
• Strong motion, animation or prototyping skills
• Experience building side projects, tools or products of your own
• Contributions to open-source projects or communities
• Experience working across both consumer-facing products and tools for professional or developer audiences

What you’ll get

• Competitive salary + equity options
• Hybrid working from our London office
• 25 paid days holiday + UK public holidays
• Private health insurance
• Pension contribution
• Income replacement & employee assistance programmes
• Equipment allowance + great tech stack
• The opportunity to shape not just how tldraw’s products look, but what we build next

About tldraw

tldraw is a London-based Series A startup building tools for infinite canvas and creative collaboration.

Our open-source canvas SDK powers products built by developers around the world, while tldraw.com gives us a place to explore what the medium itself can become.

We’re now experimenting with a broader product suite: evolving our existing products, exploring new applications built on top of tldraw, and making bets on new ways for people to create, think and work with computers.

We like building things, putting them in front of people and seeing what happens. We care deeply about craft, creative tooling and making software that feels genuinely new.

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