Design Engineer - Restate

Restate is a lightweight runtime that turns AI agents, workflows, and backend services into durable processes so teams can focus on their logic, not failure mechanics.

The Role

We're looking for a Design Engineer to own the core Restate UI—from design decisions to the code that ships them.

Our UI is where developers end up when something is running, stuck, or has already gone wrong. It's a live window onto a distributed system that keeps moving while you're looking at it. The data is large, it changes under you, and the person reading it is usually in a hurry. Holding a high bar of simplicity as the product grows is the core of this role.

The Opportunity

• Front-row seat to an infra shift: Durable runtimes like Restate are becoming foundational infrastructure components and critical pieces for AI applications.
• State-of-the-art tech: Restate re-imagines durable execution as a lightweight self-contained stack—shipped as a single Rust binary with an optimized custom storage layer, low latency orchestration, and an analytics engine.
• Enterprise Traction: Used by Fortune 500 companies, Tier 1 banks, and cutting-edge AI startups.
• World-class team: Partner directly with creators of Apache Flink and leaders from Meta's messaging infrastructure.

What You'll Do

• Architect, design, and ship the core Restate UI: Take features from whiteboarding sessions with engineers to production-ready code.
• Show what the system is actually doing: Visualize execution timelines, retries, queues, state, and failures to help developers troubleshoot quickly under pressure.
• Build for data at scale: Support large result sets, live updates, virtualization, filtering, search, and charts.
• Design edge states: Sweating details on loading, empty, partial, error, and oversized result sets.
• Maintain performance: Optimize rendering cost, data loading, and perceived latency as core design decisions.
• Unify mental models: Ensure consistent concepts and terminology across the UI, SDKs, and documentation.
• Build scalable design systems in code: Create reusable components and patterns for visual and interactive architecture.

What We're Looking For

Must-haves

• Production front-end skills: Proficiency in React, TypeScript, and modern HTML/CSS to ship features independently.
• Portfolio of shipped work: Demonstrating strong craft and the underlying code.
• Strong design sensibility & visual bar: Ability to set and maintain high aesthetic quality across the product.
• Information design & data-intensive interfaces: Experience managing large datasets, visual hierarchy, virtualization, and real-data charting.
• Front-end performance tuning: Proven ability to profile and resolve slow rendering, long lists, wasted re-renders, and bundle size issues.
• Motion design in code: Using motion to effectively communicate state, time, and system dynamism.
• Design systems engineering: Building reusable components that scale across team contributions.
• Technical literacy: Ability to read API specs, backend code, and system architectures.
• AI literacy: Leveraging AI tools to multiply your impact and unblock execution.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience building developer tools, infrastructure, or AI products.
• Data visualization expertise (timelines, traces, time-series graphs).
• Focus on web accessibility and keyboard-first user interfaces.
• Creative development experience (e.g., Three.js, GLSL shaders).
• Familiarity deploying serverless or edge environments (Cloudflare Workers, Vercel).

Not a Fit

• You want to manage a design team rather than work as a hands-on senior IC.
• You expect complete designs handed off to you or heavy top-down direction.
• You are a designer who doesn't code, or an engineer who ignores visual details.

Location and Travel

• Location: Remote in Europe preferred; US remote considered for exceptional candidates.
• Travel: Minimal; occasional team offsites.