Design Engineer

Fuel your ambition with a career that moves you forward

Type: Full-time

Role

Reports to

CTO

Primary focus

This is not a pure design role. This is not a pure development role. It is both, and that is the whole point.

You will sit between product design and engineering. You own Figma when flows and components need to be designed, and you own the codebase when those designs need to be production ready. You will spot visual and UX issues in our live platform and raise PRs to fix them without being asked. You will build new features from a Figma base through to a working React component. You will care about the craft at both ends.

The split is roughly 50/50. Some weeks you will be deep in Figma mapping out a new product surface. Other weeks you will be in the codebase tightening component polish, fixing hover states, refining spacing, or adding to our Storybook component library. Both matter equally here.

There is little to no red tape. If you see something that should be better, say so. If you have an idea that would improve the product, bring it. Your voice will be heard and acted on. We are looking for someone who will help define and shape the product direction, not just execute briefs handed down from above.

• Figma: flows, components, and ongoing contributions to the design system
• Production UI polish: you notice issues in the live platform and raise PRs to fix them
• New feature buildout: from Figma to working React component, independently
• Storybook: component stories and documentation as the living source of truth for the dev team
• Design system consistency: tokens and patterns applied correctly across every surface you touch
• Close collaboration with the leadership team and everyone in between

You have at least 2 to 3 years doing both design and frontend development, formally or not. You have shipped production UI before. You are comfortable raising PRs into a real codebase. A degree is not required. Proof of work is.

You have real Figma skills. You think in components, variants, auto layout, and design tokens. You can build a complex component set that a developer can actually consume.

You have real frontend skills. React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS. You have raised PRs into a production codebase. You know the difference between something that looks right and something that renders right.

You are AI-native. You use AI tools as a natural extension of how you work, and you ship faster because of it.

You have taste. You notice when a shadow is wrong. When a hover state feels lazy. When the spacing is slightly off grid. These things bother you enough to fix them unprompted.

You have a passion for aesthetics that borders on obsessive. The kind of person who notices the transition timing on a dropdown in someone else's app and has an opinion on it. Maybe you spend weekends building things just to see if you can. Maybe you obsess over custom icon sets, micro-animations, or the way interactions could make a UI feel more alive. Whatever your thing is, you go deep on it and you bring that energy to your work.

You have worked on a B2B or enterprise product before. You understand that density is a feature, not a problem.

Tech you will work with:

• React 19, Next.js, TypeScript
• Tailwind CSS 4 (CSS-first config)
• An internal component library built on shadcn/ui
• Storybook for component documentation and visual testing
• Figma, with a mature design system already in place
• LucideReact for icons
• AI tooling, whatever flavour works for you

This is not a role where you will be told what to build and reviewed on every PR. We do not have bandwidth for that, and frankly you would not enjoy it anyway. You need to be able to look at our product, identify what needs improving, and go fix it. If you need hand-holding on either the design or the code side, this is not the right fit.

We are looking for a candidate that has a passion for design and keeping up to date with the latest trends in tech.

Annual Salary CTC TBC

CohesionX is led by South African industry veterans and visionary leaders, dedicated to fostering sustainable growth through technological breakthroughs and a culture of collaboration. Building secure, enterprise-grade AI platforms that blend seamlessly into existing workflows, the company turns intelligence into an invisible force multiplier across operations. With VectorMind, their top South African flagship AI product, they prioritize real business outcomes over flashy tools, helping organisations extract value from unstructured data, automate decisions, and deploy agentic workflows tailored to their domain.