Senior Product Design Engineer

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior Product Design Engineer based in South Africa.

Own core product experiences end to end, combining exceptional product design judgment with strong design engineering skills.

You’ll turn ideas and prototypes into production-ready components that are accessible, robust, and ready for engineers to use directly.

The role sits at the intersection of product design, frontend engineering, design systems, and interaction design.

You’ll build and evolve reusable primitives while continuously improving a shared open-source component library.

You’ll work with modern AI development tools to prototype quickly, explore ideas, and accelerate the path from concept to production.

The environment is remote-first and async, with a high degree of autonomy, direct feedback, and a strong emphasis on craft and thoughtful collaboration.

This is an opportunity to shape both the product experience and the design system behind a globally used scheduling platform.

Accountabilities

• Own core product surfaces from concept through production, including booking flows, scheduling primitives, and team and enterprise experiences.
• Translate product problems and hypotheses into high-quality designs, prototypes, and production-ready frontend components.
• Build and test working prototypes using modern AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, and v0, selecting the fastest approach for answering product and design questions.
• Deliver components that product engineers can use directly, ensuring correct semantics, complete interaction states, accessibility, and production-quality implementation.
• Design, engineer, and maintain custom components and primitives rather than relying on generic third-party UI libraries.
• Continuously improve the shared component library by auditing existing primitives, identifying gaps, refining patterns, and contributing reusable components rather than creating one-off solutions.
• Maintain consistency across tokens, spacing, states, dark mode, motion, and interaction patterns, ensuring every new product surface strengthens the overall design system.
• Apply motion and animation thoughtfully, using it to clarify interactions and improve the experience without adding unnecessary complexity.
• Own outcomes rather than simply delivering design artifacts by framing hypotheses, defining success criteria, supporting implementation, and evaluating results.
• Maintain a high accessibility standard across all work, including keyboard navigation, focus management, semantics, contrast, and motion preferences.
• Refine the details that elevate product quality, including empty states, error messaging, loading behavior, transitions, and other interaction nuances.
• Collaborate openly with product and design leadership, sharing work early, incorporating feedback, and allowing technical and product constraints to inform design decisions.
• Document design thinking and decisions through written documentation, prototypes, and recorded walkthroughs to support effective asynchronous collaboration.

Requirements

• Proven experience as a product designer who has evolved substantially into design engineering, with ownership of complex and ambiguous product areas from problem definition through launch and iteration.
• Exceptional product design craft combined with strong frontend engineering skills in HTML, CSS, TypeScript, and React.
• Demonstrated ability to independently turn product and design concepts into polished, working implementations without relying on another engineer to make ideas production-ready.
• Strong experience designing and engineering custom UI components and primitives, rather than primarily consuming third-party component libraries.
• Deep expertise in headless primitive composition, with experience using Base UI, Radix, or similar technologies; direct experience with open-source component systems is a strong advantage.
• Strong understanding of motion design principles, including timing, easing, choreography, and the judgment to determine when animation adds value.
• Daily experience using AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, v0, or comparable solutions.
• Deep familiarity with web standards and browser-native platform primitives, with the ability to understand what the browser already provides before introducing additional libraries.
• Proven experience building and maintaining design systems, including understanding the distinction between reusable primitives, components, and product-specific patterns.
• Strong accessibility knowledge covering WCAG, ARIA, assistive technologies, keyboard interaction, focus management, and accessible design patterns.
• Ability to understand the technical architecture behind product experiences, including APIs, data models, application state, and technical constraints.
• Strong written communication skills, with an emphasis on clarity and effective asynchronous documentation.
• Collaborative and receptive approach to feedback, with a willingness to share unfinished work, challenge ideas constructively, and adapt designs based on input.
• High-trust, high-autonomy mindset with the ability to thrive in a remote and asynchronous environment without constant supervision.
• Nice to have: Open-source contributions or publicly available side projects demonstrating your design and engineering work.
• Nice to have: Experience with scheduling, calendaring, time zones, or recurrence rules.
• Nice to have: Familiarity with locale- and time-aware web APIs such as Intl.DateTimeFormat.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation: $100,000–$150,000 annual salary, with the same salary range regardless of where you live.
• Equity: Equity included as part of the compensation package.
• Fully remote: Work from anywhere in the world.
• Async-first flexibility: Work according to your own schedule and flow without unnecessary meetings or daily standups.
• High autonomy: No micromanagement, with a strong culture of trust and ownership.
• Work-life flexibility: Take time away for personal and family needs without requiring approval for every interruption.
• Paid time off: 30 paid OOO days per year, regardless of where you are located.
• Team retreats: Annual team retreats in different locations around the world.
• People-first culture: Work in a stable, family-friendly environment focused on trust, kindness, and sustainable high performance.
• AI-enabled workflow: Use modern AI development tools as part of the everyday product and engineering process.
• High-impact work: Shape core product experiences and reusable design infrastructure used by a globally distributed user base.
• Design and engineering ownership: Have meaningful influence over both the product experience and the underlying component system.

How Jobgether works:

We use an AI-powered matching process to ensure your application is reviewed quickly, objectively, and fairly against the role's core requirements. Our system identifies the top-fitting candidates, and this shortlist is then shared directly with the hiring company. The final decision and next steps (interviews, assessments) are managed by their internal team.We appreciate your interest and wish you the best! Why Apply Through Jobgether? Data Privacy Notice: By submitting your application, you acknowledge that Jobgether will process your personal data to evaluate your candidacy and share relevant information with the hiring employer. This processing is based on legitimate interest and pre-contractual measures under applicable data protection laws (including GDPR). You may exercise your rights (access, rectification, erasure, objection) at any time. #LI-CL1