Senior Product Design Engineer

About Cortex: Cortex is the premier, internationally recognized AI-powered Internal Developer Portal pioneer, software reliability innovator, and engineering infrastructure leader on an absolute mission to help developer teams ship better software faster. Enforcing automated reliability metrics, software cataloging, and strict quality guardrails across complex cloud architectures, the portal empowers large-scale organizations to accelerate feature velocity without fracturing live code bases. Backed by an elite $60M Series C funding round led by Scale Ventures alongside Sequoia Capital and IVP, Cortex drives measurable impact across industry giants including Canva, Grammarly, and Skyscanner—effectively reducing incidents by 30% and cutting Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) by an average of 50%. Operating as a highly collaborative, fully remote ~80 person engineering ecosystem, the organization provides high-agency design technologists with an uncompromised canvas to build world-class user experiences and shape developer governance tools safely worldwide.

Position Overview

We are seeking a highly analytical, systems-minded Senior Product Design Engineer (historically titled as a UX Engineer, Design Engineer, or Creative Technologist) to join our core centralized Design and Interface collective in a full-time remote capacity across the United States. Functioning as the essential operational glue cross-connecting our core design visualizers with front-end feature teams, you will step up to claim individual strategic accountability for owning, defining, and scaling our design systems from abstract Figma tokens through to production-ready code compilation. Shifting completely away from legacy static mocking or passive layout handoffs, you will operate as a multi-disciplinary software generalist who writes component code fluidly, maps interface microinteractions smoothly natively using React and Tailwind, and bridges the gap between raw backend telemetry and intuitive UI layouts.

Key Responsibilities

• Enterprise Design System Ownership and Advocacy: Formulate, document, and execute the end-to-end evolution of Cortex’s multi-tenant design system, maintaining uncompromised alignment between Figma design tokens and runtime browser components natively utilizing UI/UX Design patterns.
• Delightful Developer Experience Curation: Drive the visual and functional quality bar across the product surface area, systematically hunting down UX “papercuts,” iterating on clunky data interfaces, and polishing microinteractions to deliver an elite developer portal.
• High-Fidelity Functional Prototyping: Partner peer-to-peer alongside internal Product Managers, core Backend Engineers, and Front-end Leads to construct interactive, production-grade high-fidelity prototypes to illustrate complex computational workflows.
• Type-Safe Feature Additions Implementation: Design, test, and ship UI-heavy application views and client-side modules from scratch natively leveraging Frontend components, TypeScript interfaces, and Tailwind utility classes.
• Micro-Animation and Layout Polish: Design and inject fluid UI animation schemas, state transitions, and responsive layout parameters across data-heavy graphs and developer dashboards to intelligently guide users through incident responses.
• Rigorous Front-End Code Hygiene: Maintain absolute accountability for code quality, writing comprehensive automated component test blocks and validating rendering performance boundaries across varied browser viewports.
• User-Feedback Synthesis Loops: Synthesize qualitative customer feedback and quantitative analytics records to drive interface upgrades, while maintaining the confidence to execute design choices autonomously when direct inputs are absent.
• Distributed Culture Engagement: Collaborate actively within structured asynchronous code review loops and participate in periodic multi-national corporate offsite events to kick off strategic software roadmaps.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• 5 to 7+ years of verified professional history running advanced front-end software engineering, product design infrastructure development, UX engineering consulting, or high-fidelity UI/UX prototyping.
• Deep, authoritative technical command of human-computer interaction (HCI) rules, design systems tokenization, web performance optimization, asynchronous component rendering, and CSS layout engines.
• Expert-tier background building composable components, managing client-side states, and configuring responsive interfaces natively utilizing UI/UX Design methodologies.
• Practical operational familiarity organizing multi-tier code branches, debugging nested layouts, and managing modular code structures natively using Frontend runtimes (specifically including React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS).
• Documented Scaling History: A proven track record of being either the absolute owner or a principal contributor to a production-grade corporate design system utilized across multiple engineering cells over a significant operational timeline.
• Outstanding verbal, written, and document communication traits in fluent English, with an intense attention to detail and a passion for turning dense engineering parameters into beautiful, useful, and scannable interface magic.
• Location Context: Position open exclusively to qualified creative technologists based permanently and resident within the **United States** to work under a 100% remote home-office layout.

Preferred Strategic Indicators (Nice to Have)

• Prior commercial design engineering history operating explicitly within a fast-scaling developer tools startup, enterprise infrastructure SaaS corporation, or multi-tenant cloud analytics environment.
• Direct hands-on experience utilizing generative engineering and AI development tools responsibly to accelerate layout velocities while applying rigorous manual code audits to enforce safety.
• Familiarity with complex charting dashboards, data visualization components, or tracking browser runtime performance profiling metrics.
• An outcome-driven personal philosophy rooted in relentless craft execution, an execution model that resists automated mediocrity, and an intense passion for building platforms that engineers love to use.

What We Offer

• High-Yield United States Salaried Structure: An attractive full-time base salary scale structured transparently between $160,000 – $190,000 USD per year, calibrated precisely to evaluate your intersectional design-code craft, supplemented by a competitive corporate **Equity** package.
• The exceptional professional canvas to directly direct, shape, and code-engineer the design system blocks and frontend architectures power-routing interface interactions for a Series C funded internal developer portal leader.
• Profound work-from-home remote parameters offering an elite fully distributed workplace model, complete scheduling trust, and zero physical geographic office commuting friction across America.
• Immediate baseline eligibility to access top-tier health protections, featuring **100% Company-Covered Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance Plans** for employees.
• Access to elite financial and lifestyle calibration benefits, providing an Unlimited PTO vacation framework, flexible working hours, a 401(k) retirement structure, and gender-neutral parental leave protection layers.
• Generous remote-office optimization tools, including a dedicated **$400 Monthly Perks Stipend** (usable for anything to support remote wellness) alongside a **$1,000 Yearly Learning & Development fund** for professional certification coverage, topped with corporate Pet Insurance options.