Senior Product Design Engineer

🧠 About Cortex
Cortex helps engineering teams ship better software faster. We're an AI-powered Internal Developer Portal that enforces reliability standards across every team automatically, so organizations can move fast without breaking things. Our customers reduce incidents by 30%, cut MTTR by an average of 50%, and ensure that AI code doesn't compromise service quality. Companies like Canva, Grammarly, and Skyscanner rely on Cortex to drive measurable impact on their most critical engineering outcomes.

📍Location
We’re fully remote and welcome candidates from across the US. We get together a few times a year for company offsites where we build stronger relationships, kick off important work, and genuinely enjoy spending time together.

🤝 The Team
Our team is ~80 people building something developers actually want to use. We recently raised a $60M Series C led by Scale Ventures (alongside Sequoia and IVP). We're focused on making engineering teams more effective. You can read more about our latest funding round here.

💼 Role Summary
We’re looking for a Senior Product Design Engineer who can help be the glue between the design team and the frontend engineering team. This is a hybrid role, and you’ll excel if you enjoy being a generalist. Sometimes this role is called UX Engineer, Design Engineer, or Creative Technologist. Here are two ways others have defined this role. The main idea is that you’re a designer who works mostly in code. However, you are MORE than just a vibe coder. We use AI tools at Cortex, but rely on them only where it increases our velocity. We are fully accountable for the code we ship.

You’ll report to the design team, which consists of 2 designers that also code, and will fully own our design system from Figma through implementation. Additionally, you’ll contribute across our codebase to ship features and reinforce consistent patterns, while prioritizing creating a world-class UX for our users. We highly prize craft and work tirelessly to ensure Cortex remains at the forefront of products for engineering teams.

🛠️ Responsibilities

• Contribute to raising the design bar at Cortex: You’ll work with the design team to push the boundaries of our design and user experience. You are relentless about crafting a delightful experience that we can all be proud of.
• Continuous improvement and animation: You’ll also look for opportunities to ensure no part of the product falls below standard best practices. That means reducing papercuts, iterating on clunky user experiences, polishing microinteractions, and adding appropriate UI animation to guide users to success.
• Design system ownership: You’ll own the design system end-to-end, in both Figma and code. You’ll work closely with other designers who are consuming components in figma, and developers consuming components in code.
• Prototype: You will assist the design team, product management team, and engineering teams in rapid prototyping when a high fidelity prototype is the best tool to illustrate functionality.
• Ship feature additions and fixes: You’ll be asked to design and ship UI-heavy features across the product surface area, ensuring components are performant and well-tested while collaborating with product management, frontend, and backend developers when necessary.
• Attention to detail: One of your core responsibilities is to maintain a strong attention to detail. You’ll be asked to regularly identify areas of inconsistency and incompleteness, and proactively work to make our product feel polished and professional.

✔️Qualifications

• 5-7+ years working at the intersection of design and code in a product-led company. Startup experience is highly desirable, as we move very quickly. Bonus points for experience with developer tools or enterprise SaaS companies.
• Either owned or been a major contributor to a design system before. Ideally, you’ve had to see the impact of your designs over a larger scale or significant period of time.
• Deep experience with React, Typescript, and Tailwind is preferred. We are open to talented candidates who haven’t had the opportunity to work with this stack before, but will need to understand how quickly you can ramp up.
• You can point to a portfolio of work (or github profile) that clearly demonstrates your skill and attention to detail in both product design and frontend development.
• Passionate about creating beautiful, useful, and usable interfaces guided by user feedback. You prioritize user feedback when making decisions, but are still comfortable making choices without it.

💰 Compensation

• Starting Salary Range: $160k - $190k
• Competitive Equity Package

*Our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role is eligible for equity and benefits.

🌴 Perks & Benefits

• National medical, dental & vision insurance (we cover 100% for employees!)
• Unlimited PTO & flexible working hours
• 401k plan
• Gender-neutral parental leave
• $1000 yearly Learning & Development stipend
• $400 monthly perks stipend (use it on anything)
• Pet Insurance

Cortex is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Cortex is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. For individuals with disabilities who would like to request an accommodation, please email people@cortex.io