Design Engineer (m/f/d)

nuwacom is a European AI platform that securely connects company knowledge, chat, meeting notes, agents, apps, and workflows. This makes AI an integral part of everyday work, enabling greater productivity and better results while keeping companies in full control of their data and access permissions.

As a Design Engineer, you bring new features into production quickly and with a high level of design precision. You are part of the Design team but spend most of your time in code. You work at the intersection of Product Design, our design system, and the Engineering team.

You collaborate closely with Product Design, Design Engineering, and the Engineering team.

• Build and ship production-ready UI. You translate concepts and prototypes into high-quality interfaces using React and TypeScript. You use existing components, tokens, and interaction patterns to move features swiftly through to release.

• Ensure UI quality across the Engineering team. You review features during development, identify inconsistencies in layout, typography, and interaction, and fix them directly in code or together with the developers responsible.

• Advance new concepts through prototyping. Together with Product Design, you build functional prototypes, assess technical feasibility, and refine user flows and UX/UI details directly in the implementation.

• Use AI purposefully through spec-driven development. You use Claude Code, Cursor, Lovable, or comparable tools in your daily development workflow. You guide implementation with clear requirements, design system rules, and acceptance criteria. You independently review and refine generated code.

• Embed the design system in implementation. You ensure that AI-generated interfaces also meet our standards and coordinate any necessary extensions with Design Engineering. Responsiveness, accessibility, and performance are part of your commitment to quality.

• At least 3 years of professional frontend development experience with a clear UI focus. You have implemented and shipped high-quality user interfaces yourself. A background solely in backend development, or frontend experience without demonstrated UI expertise, is not a fit for this role.

• Strong knowledge of React, TypeScript, and modern CSS, along with experience using Tailwind CSS and shadcn/ui or comparable component libraries.

• Practical experience with automated testing using Vitest and Playwright. You cover components and key user flows with appropriate unit, integration, and end-to-end tests.

• A keen eye for UI quality. You notice when hierarchy, spacing, typography, or interactions feel off and can improve these details independently.

• Experience with design systems. You apply components and tokens consistently and know how to ensure their use in AI-assisted development workflows.

• A proven AI workflow. You use AI tools purposefully in development and can explain how you provide requirements, evaluate results, and turn generated output into production-ready code.

• Autonomy and speed of execution. You can work with requirements that are not yet fully defined, clarify open questions, and make pragmatic decisions. You feel comfortable in a fast-paced startup.

• Fluent English for collaboration within our international team.

Ideally, you also bring UX and interaction design experience to help develop user flows and interaction concepts together with Product Design. Experience with spec-driven development, Storybook, and visual regression testing is also helpful.

• A role within the Design team with a clear engineering focus: you design and implement, spending more time in code than in Figma.

• Direct influence on new features and the quality of our product.

• Close collaboration and short lines of communication between Design, Product, and Engineering.

• AI-assisted work as an everyday practice, with the opportunity to actively shape how we work.

• An experienced founding team.