Design engineering

Aug 11, 2024

Design engineer (or design technologist) is an emerging role many companies are adding to their roster. This unique role is the mortar between the visual and technical bricks. The nature of design engineering fosters creativity, and it is a hot topic.

Venn diagram depicting overlapping "Design" and "Engineering" circles

My backstory

I’m a design engineer with 15 years of experience in both design and frontend engineering. In 2021, I was tasked with building and leading a design engineering team. Before writing job descriptions, I asked myself “how will these design engineers positively impact our organization?” and “what are the expectations for a design engineer?”

Over the past few years I’ve built design engineering teams, and put together resources and leveling guides for design engineers.

As Carta’s sole design engineering manager, I now manage a globally distributed team of design engineers responsible for Carta's universal design system. Our design system usage metrics show that over 100,000 of the components are in use across Carta's suite of products.

This post is my perspective on, and appreciation for, design engineering. I’ll explain why design engineering is an important role and what the expectations may be for a design engineer.

Why design engineering is important

Quality software should no longer be seen as a differentiator, but an expectation. Customers deserve intuitive, accessible user interfaces.

Design engineers help keep the quality bar high by championing page performance, accessibility, user delight, viewport responsiveness, and reusability of components/tokens.

Design engineers solve design problems with code. They are curious across disciplines and care about the craft.

Design engineers share a deep concern for the user experience (UX) and the developer experience (DX). Our design system team at Carta serves both designers and engineers by offering documented and tested components in Figma and code. Not only do we create reusable components and documentation, our team creates tools and guides to help designers and engineers move faster.

Expectations for a design engineer

The most important skill design engineers possess is the ability to communicate with both designers and frontend engineers. They’re able to give feedback to both sides, and can act as translators between the two worlds through prototypes.

Design engineers are quick to prototype to test design hypotheses. They’re capable of shipping production code. They collaborate in Figma (or other design tools) with visual and product designers to refine interactions, and can explain the technical considerations of design decisions. Depending on the team or business needs, design engineers may work on a company's design system, external marketing sites, branding, or product development.

It's important as a hiring manager to know what your team needs. Some design engineers have more of a technical background, while others have more of a product design background. They may be on platform teams, like a design system team, or embedded in product teams. Expectations of these roles differ based on team and business needs.

Here’s a short list of reasons to hire a design engineer.

You need a design system created, up-leveled, or maintained.
You need to raise the design quality in your software products.
You'd like to tastefully apply animations or advanced layouts to your site or app.
You want someone that will carry the torch for craft from designers to engineering.
You need to test designs in code with prototypes.

Concluding thoughts

Design engineering will continue to evolve as our tools do. The ability to contribute to both design and frontend engineering will be an increasingly valuable skill. The demand for quality software will rise, and design engineers will help meet that need. I’m excited to watch and contribute to the expansion of design engineering.

Design engineering

My backstory

Why design engineering is important

Expectations for a design engineer

Concluding thoughts

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