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