Design Engineer for AI Gateway at Vercel

About the Role:

AI Gateway provides developers with a unified platform to connect applications and agents to hundreds of models using one API key. It handles provider routing, billing, observability, and security controls, allowing teams to manage spend and security across production AI workloads.

Designing AI Gateway is a complex systems challenge. The goal is to create an intuitive interface—whether in the dashboard, model catalog, CLI, API response, or code—that lets developers choose models, make and verify requests, diagnose failures, and configure routing, budgets, credentials, and security controls without losing sight of their application.

As the Design Engineer for AI Gateway, you will own product design and frontend implementation across these surfaces. Collaborating with customers, a Product Manager, and engineers, you will define problems, explore solutions, build production experiences, ship them, and learn from post-launch outcomes.

AI Gateway is live, with the model ecosystem evolving rapidly. This role offers a unique opportunity to leverage your product judgment, design skills, and coding expertise to shape a developer product and deliver the experience yourself.

You will work closely with a Product Manager and dedicated engineering team, with access to the broader Product Design team for critique, collaboration, and support. AI Gateway will be your primary focus, with opportunities to drive design-led improvements across Vercel. You will report to the Design Team.

Location flexibility is available: in-office anchor days (Monday, Tuesday, Friday) for those within commuting distance of SF, NY, London, or Berlin; fully remote for others.

What You Will Do:

• Own product design and frontend implementation for critical parts of the journey, from discovering a model to making a successful request and operating AI in production.
• Design and build production experiences across websites, dashboards, CLI, and APIs, selecting the appropriate medium for each problem.
• Make complex concepts like models, providers, credentials, routing, budgets, logs, performance, privacy, and governance understandable, while creating reusable patterns for new providers, modalities, and workloads.
• Engage directly with customers and use product data to identify problems, define success metrics, make trade-offs, and improve shipped products.
• Ensure quality post-launch, focusing on visual and interaction design, accessibility, performance, resilience, instrumentation, and edge cases.
• Use coding agents to explore and implement ideas quickly, while ensuring testing, debugging, and accountability for shipped code.

About You:

• Your portfolio reflects personal projects you identified, designed, built, shipped, and learned from post-launch.
• You build production-quality web applications using React and TypeScript, and can confidently contribute to large, existing codebases.
• You excel in visual and interaction design, making technical or data-rich products accessible while retaining advanced user control.
• You seamlessly navigate graphical interfaces, CLI workflows, API behavior, and implementation details, treating accessibility, performance, failure recovery, and instrumentation as integral to design.
• You leverage customer research and product data to inform decisions, communicate reasoning clearly, challenge ideas constructively, and adapt when evidence changes.
• You integrate coding agents into daily workflows but retain responsibility for explaining, testing, debugging, and accountability for the code they assist in producing.

There is no strict career path for this role. You may come from product design, frontend engineering, creative development, or any other background. Vercel values the quality of your shipped work and the judgment behind it.

Bonus If You:

• Have experience with developer tools, infrastructure products, model marketplaces, or observability experiences.
• Have worked with AI models, providers, inference platforms, guardrails, or AI application tooling.
• Have experience with APIs, command-line tools, structured product content, or agent-facing interfaces.
• Have built an application or agent using Vercel’s AI SDK or AI Gateway.

Benefits:

• Competitive compensation package, including equity.
• Inclusive healthcare package.
• Learning and growth opportunities, including mentorship and networking events.
• Flexible time off policy.
• Provided gear and a WFH budget to outfit your workspace.