Senior Design Engineer

Description

Mortgage is a $13T market in the US. It is central to the middle class and to how families build wealth, yet most of its work is still done by hand while other financial products have moved to APIs.

The company started from scratch and built a vertically integrated mortgage platform that runs loan origination through a single API.

Publicly traded companies and the largest US originators already build on the platform, and revenue grows every month.

Investors include Peter Thiel, Conversion Capital, QED, Citi, Fifth Wall, and the founders of Ramp, Blend, and Mercury.

The team is largely made up of former founders. People move quickly, debate openly, and own results without needing direction. The work is demanding.

This is a Design Engineer role, meaning a designer who builds. You will make the design calls and ship them in production code instead of waiting for mockups. Figma is optional; the design happens in code.

You will design and build the borrower application, borrower dashboards, loan officer tools, and components customers embed in their own products, along with the design system that keeps everything fast, clear, and trustworthy.

Responsibilities

• Take product work from early exploration to polished production interfaces yourself, with no handoff
• Build and maintain the design system, covering tokens, type, color, spacing, and a component library that lets any engineer produce good-looking screens
• Build embeddable components that customers can theme without losing quality, accessibility, or consistency
• Turn complex workflows and dense mortgage data into something easy to understand, using layout, hierarchy, interaction, and motion
• Prototype with real code and real data, test with borrowers, loan officers, and customers, and iterate fast on the results
• Handle the details: states, edge cases, responsiveness, loading and empty states, keyboard use, and accessibility
• Work closely with PMs and engineers, raise the design standard across the team, and help others improve through feedback and reusable patterns
• Use AI and agentic coding tools at every stage, from idea exploration to shipping production interactions

Requirements

• You hold strong opinions, defend them with reasons, especially on craft, and change your mind when shown you are wrong
• You set priorities ruthlessly, focus on what matters most to users, and say no to good ideas that come at the wrong time
• You are comfortable in a heavily regulated market and design disclosures, consent, and accessibility to be clear rather than hidden
• You care about borrowers, loan officers, and the lenders who serve them, and you notice the small things others miss
• You prefer software to manual work. You treat any human step in the back-end mortgage process as a bug, and when a manual workaround exists, you flag it and push for the real fix
• You build good working relationships with product, engineering, customers, and leadership, and you get results through them
• You generate many ideas about the product and team and act on them
• You learn mortgage quickly enough to sound like you have worked in the industry for 20 years
• This role is a poor fit if you would rather build other people's designs than make design decisions yourself
• This role is a poor fit if you design in Figma and hand off the build to someone else
• This role is a poor fit if you mainly want backend or infrastructure work
• 3+ years as a product designer who codes, a design engineer, or a frontend engineer who makes design decisions
• A portfolio of live products or working prototypes with excellent visual and interaction work, which matters more to the company than title or years of experience
• Strong taste and solid fundamentals in typography, layout, hierarchy, color, interaction, and motion
• Fluent in React, TypeScript, semantic HTML, and modern CSS, and able to ship production-quality frontend code
• Experience building or leading a design system or component library, including tokens and theming
• Comfortable in Figma, mainly for exploring ideas
• A strong grasp of accessibility and responsive design
• Experience using AI and agentic coding tools in design work
• Nice to have: experience designing data-heavy or workflow-heavy products, especially in fintech, lending, or another regulated industry
• You do not need to be a mortgage expert on day one, but over time you need to understand mortgage well enough to design for it with confidence

Conditions

You must live in Palo Alto (CA) or New York City, or be willing to relocate to one of them