Product Designer - 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 Product Designer to shape Restate's core product experience. This role covers both the core Restate UI with the design system behind it and the visual work that makes durable execution understandable to developers. You'll work directly with the engineers who build the product and with the wider founding team.

The Opportunity

• Front-row seat to the biggest infra shift in decades: Durable runtimes like Restate are becoming foundational infrastructure components and a critical piece for AI applications. You'll help build the platform that enables it.
• State-of-the-art tech, built from first principles: Restate re-imagines durable execution as a lightweight self-contained stack—no database required—shipping as a single Rust binary with an optimized storage layer, low latency orchestration, and an analytics engine for observability.
• Enterprise Traction: Used by Fortune 500 companies, Tier 1 banks running critical financial workflows, and cutting-edge AI startups.
• Work with world-class engineers: Partner directly with engineers who built foundational systems at scale, including creators of Apache Flink and leaders from Meta’s messaging infrastructure.

What You’ll Do

On the core product:

• Design the core Restate UI from whiteboarding sessions with engineers through to shipping.
• Make dense information readable: execution timelines, retries, queues, state, and failures.
• Keep one mental model across the UI, SDKs, and documentation.
• Bring durable execution to life visually, maintaining a high design bar.

Around the product:

• Explain Restate's architecture visually using interactive and animated explanations.
• Utilize motion as a first-class medium to convey time, state, and dynamism.
• Ship across developer-facing content, blog illustrations, and social visuals.
• Maintain brand and visual coherence inside and outside the product.

Across both:

• Build scalable design systems and reusable components for architecture diagrams and code visualizations.
• Iterate directly with engineering without traditional handoffs.

What We’re Looking For

Must-haves:

• Product design depth on complex software: Several years designing developer tools, dashboards, or complex platforms.
• Information design: Expertise in hierarchy, density, progressive disclosure, and turning dense data into readable UI.
• Visual storytelling for technical concepts: Ability to make complex infrastructure simple and intuitive.
• Brand and campaign craft: High standard in layout, typography, illustration, and launch visuals.
• Motion design ability: Communicating system state and dynamism through motion.
• Design systems: Experience building reusable components and maintaining visual coherence.
• Strong design sensibility & autonomy: High visual bar with the ability to set direction independently.
• Technical curiosity: Capability to understand distributed systems concepts and design from deep understanding.
• Microcopy writing: Ability to craft labels, empty states, error messages, and headlines.
• AI literacy: Leveraging AI tools to increase impact and unblock workflow.

Nice-to-haves:

• Prior experience in developer tools, infrastructure, or AI products.
• Experience contributing to production design systems.
• Ability to prototype in code or use HTML/CSS to communicate ideas precisely.

Not a fit if:

• You only have experience with consumer apps or marketing sites without complex software design.
• You require a finished brief or heavy top-down direction.
• You want to manage a team rather than operate as a senior individual contributor.

Engagement, Location, and Travel

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