Design Engineer at Restate

Restate (restate.dev) is a lightweight runtime that transforms AI agents, workflows, and backend services into durable processes, allowing teams to focus on logic rather than failure mechanics.

The Role

We are seeking a Design Engineer to own the core Restate UI, encompassing both design and implementation. The UI serves as a live window into a distributed system, displaying dynamic, large-scale data for developers often under pressure. Your responsibility will span design decisions and the code that brings them to life.

The Opportunity

You’ll be at the forefront of a pivotal shift in infrastructure, as durable runtimes like Restate become a next foundational infrastructure component, especially critical for AI applications. As systems grow more agentic, long-running, and failure-prone, durable execution redefines reliability as a standard feature rather than an engineering burden.

Restate reimagines durable execution as a lightweight, self-contained stack—no database required—delivered as a single Rust binary with optimized storage, low-latency orchestration, and an analytics engine for observability.

Restate is already trusted by Fortune 500 companies, including Tier 1 banks managing critical financial workflows, as well as cutting-edge AI and infrastructure startups. You’ll tackle challenges where reliability, correctness, and operational simplicity are existential priorities.

You’ll collaborate directly with engineers who have built and scaled foundational systems, including creators of Apache Flink and leaders from Meta’s messaging infrastructure. This role offers the chance to work alongside highly skilled individuals who deeply care about their craft.

What You’ll Do

We’re looking for a Design Engineer to ensure an exceptional developer experience across the core Restate UI and related product areas. Key responsibilities include:

• Architect, design, and deliver the core Restate UI, from initial whiteboarding sessions to production-ready code.

• Visualize system behavior—execution timelines, retries, queues, state, and failures—ensuring developers can quickly diagnose issues, even under urgent circumstances.

• Design interfaces for large-scale data, supporting live updates, filtering, search, and charts that remain performant and intuitive.

• Craft edge-case states—loading, empty, partial, error, single result, and excessive results—where developers often lose or win their experience.

• Prioritize speed; the Restate UI must feel as responsive as the low-latency runtime itself, addressing rendering costs, data loading, and perceived latency as core design considerations.

• Maintain a unified mental model across the UI, SDKs, and documentation, ensuring consistent terminology and presentation.

• Visually communicate durable execution, preserving Restate’s reputation for simplifying complex technical concepts.

• Develop scalable design systems in code, creating reusable components and patterns for architecture, code, and interactive elements.

What We’re Looking For

The Profile

We seek a design engineer with strong opinions backed by a portfolio of shipped work—both designed and built. You should thrive with autonomy, work closely with the founding team, and challenge assumptions when necessary.

Must-Haves:

• Production-level front-end skills, including React, TypeScript, and modern HTML/CSS. You should be able to take a feature from concept to deployment independently.

• A portfolio showcasing both the design and code of shipped projects.

• A keen design sensibility, capable of setting a high visual standard across the entire product without waiting for direction.

• Expertise in information design—transforming complex data into quickly digestible visuals through hierarchy, density, and progressive disclosure.

• Experience with data-intensive interfaces, including pagination, virtualization, filtering, search, and charts built on real-world data.

• Front-end performance optimization skills, including profiling and fixing slow rendering, long lists, wasted re-renders, and bundle size.

• Ability to visually communicate technical concepts, making complex ideas intuitive.

• Motion design skills implemented in code, using motion to convey state, time, and dynamism.

• Experience building design systems in code, ensuring consistency as others expand on your work.

• Familiarity with API specs, queries, and backend code, even if you don’t write it yourself.

• AI literacy, leveraging AI to enhance your productivity and unblock your workflow.

Nice-to-Haves:

• Prior experience with developer tools, infrastructure, or AI products, and an understanding of what constitutes a great developer experience.

• Advanced data visualization skills, including timelines, traces, graphs, and time series with dense datasets.

• Commitment to accessibility and keyboard-first interfaces, aiming to improve current standards.

• Creative development experience, such as 3D, generative, or game-like web work (e.g., Three.js, GLSL shaders).

• Experience reaching into backend systems to support feature development.

• Familiarity with deploying and owning serverless platforms like Cloudflare Workers or Vercel, including edge runtimes, caching, and cold starts.

Not a Fit:

• You prefer leading a design team over being a senior individual contributor.

• You expect fully finished designs to hand off or require heavy direction.

• You’re a designer without coding skills or an engineer without attention to visual details.

• You lack interest in technical subject matter, as the role hinges on translating complex concepts.