Design Engineer

About Native

Native is a web and product agency. We build whatever a business runs on: websites, web apps, internal tools, dashboards and AI products. Our clients range from funded software companies to trades and service businesses that run almost entirely in person, and the job is the same at heart every time. Find what is slowing the team down, then design and build the thing that fixes it.

Strategy, design and development sit in one team, with no handoffs in between. AI handles the slow, repetitive work that used to fill a project timeline. That is why we can move as fast as we do, and it is why this role exists.

The role

At most agencies, design and development are two separate jobs. A designer makes a file, hands it over, and a developer builds something close to it. With AI, that split has stopped making sense. Our designers develop, our developers design, and the people who are best at this work do both.

As a design engineer at Native, you take a project from a blank page to something live and in use, whether that is a website, an app, or a tool a team opens every morning. You design it, you build it, and you make the calls along the way that make it work for the business, not only the ones that make it look good.

The best work we do sits where business and technology meet. A beautiful interface for the wrong problem is still the wrong thing, so every project starts with understanding how a company actually makes money and where its people lose time. A software company's signup flow and a contractor's job schedule are different problems, and you take both seriously.

We are not going to give you a list of tasks for every day of the week, because the honest answer is that you will do whatever the project needs. One week it might be a brand and a website. The next it might be a scheduling tool for a field crew, or a dashboard that replaces the spreadsheet an operations team outgrew years ago. When something comes up that you have never done before, you work out how to do it.

What you would work on

• Websites for all kinds of companies, from software startups to local service businesses.
• Internal tools that replace the spreadsheets, paperwork and manual steps a team repeats every day.
• Web apps, client portals and dashboards, from the first design to launch.
• AI products and automations that take busywork off a team's plate.
• Moving sites off Webflow and Framer onto a custom stack, without losing what worked.

What we are looking for

• Taste. You can tell when something is off, and you do not ship it until it is right. Your portfolio shows it.
• You build beautiful things. Real websites, apps and tools, designed and shipped, that people actually use. Mockups alone are not enough.
• You understand business and technology. More importantly, you understand where the two meet. Everything we build exists to help somebody's business run better or grow. You learn how that business works, and you make decisions as if it were yours.
• Nothing is "not your job". "I don't know how to do that" is where you start, not where you stop. You figure it out.
• Cracked with AI. AI is part of how you work every day, not something you tried once. You use it to design, prototype, write code and ship faster than you could without it, and you bring the judgment it cannot.

Nice to have

• Experience with Next.js, Astro or another modern framework.
• You have built an internal tool, or worked inside a business that runs on one.
• Motion and interaction design.
• Experience working directly with clients.

How we hire

A short video application, then a 30-minute call, then one small paid project so both sides can see how it goes. Everyone who applies hears back.