[Hiring] Senior Design Engineer @Premise

Role Description

Native is hiring a Senior Design Engineer to design, build, and maintain the many surfaces where a person encounters Native: the public website and the internal tools the company runs on. This is deliberately not a front-end role implementing someone else’s designs, and it is not a webmaster maintaining a site an agency built. We are hiring one person who is both the designer and the engineer, and who owns outcomes end to end.

Native sells intelligence-grade software to sophisticated enterprise buyers. The surfaces have to look like it. Raising Native’s public web presence and internal product surfaces to the standard of the underlying technology is the mandate of this role.

The multiplier is AI. Native builds with coding agents as a matter of course, and this role only makes sense for someone who does the same. We expect one person to ship what a conventional team would ship, at a higher craft bar. Candidates who use AI as autocomplete are not the profile; candidates who have restructured how they work around agents are.

The role sits in the marketing organization but is a technical role held to the standards of Native’s core engineering team. There is no design team to hand off to and no front-end team to delegate to. The mandate is leverage: one first-rate design engineer instead of a web team, an agency, and an internal tools team. This is a senior individual contributor role. It carries ownership, not headcount.

Responsibilities

• Own the Public Web Presence:
  • Design, build, ship, and measure Native’s website end to end: product story, launch pages, campaign sites, careers.
  • Own performance, accessibility, SEO, and the analytics instrumentation that makes web performance legible to marketing.
  • The site is a product, not a brochure, and it is never handed to an agency.
• Own Internal Product Surfaces:
  • Design and build the internal applications the company runs on, and take them from working tools to production-grade products.
  • Focus on real interaction design, real information architecture, access control, error and empty states, observability, and maintainability.
  • These should feel like the best software the company uses.
• Build and Own the Brand OS:
  • Turn the Native brand into a working system rather than a folder of files.
  • One GitHub repo holding the type, color, spacing, motion, components, templates, and the rules for how Native looks and sounds.
  • Built in a tokenized fashion so that a person or an agent can produce on-brand work without a designer in the loop.
• Set and Hold the Craft Bar:
  • Be the person in the company who will not ship something ugly.
  • Focus on typography, motion, density, responsive behavior, load performance, and the details that separate a memorable site from a forgettable one.
• Ship to Engineering Standards and Partner Across Teams:
  • Version control, code review, CI, observability, and documentation, building systems others can operate and extend.
  • Translate what marketing, product, and leadership need into shipped surfaces, working with core engineering on platform standards.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated, portfolio-backed ability to both design and build production web software at a high craft bar.
• Has personally shipped public-facing sites with considered typography, purposeful motion, deliberate art direction, and performance that survives an audit.
• Has shipped data-dense B2B or internal applications, including dashboards, tables, filters, permissions, and workflows.
• Daily, production-level use of AI coding agents, and the ability to build the harness around them.
• Comfortable being the only person who does this job, taking a vague business need and returning a shipped surface without a spec, a designer, a PM, or QA in between.

Requirements

• Agency or design studio pedigree combined with in-house product experience.
• A public record of craft, such as Awwwards, FWA or CSS Design Awards recognition.
• Experience as a founding or first design engineer, where the job was to establish the bar rather than inherit it.
• 3D and WebGL experience, and data-visualization depth built from real data rather than component-library defaults.
• Experience building internal tools on top of third-party SaaS APIs.

Company Description

Native is a focused spinout backed by Vista, a $100B fund backing leaders in Artificial Intelligence and advanced technologies. Its mandate is to build the first intelligence-grade system for the world’s largest and least-understood channel of trade. It’s doing this by reverse-engineering analog markets into a digital graph, delivering precision, clarity, and control at enterprise scale. It is headquartered in New York City, with offices in Mexico City and Bogotá.

Location

• Cape Town
• Ciudad de México