Design Engineer

Spear AI is seeking an experienced Design Engineer who builds beautiful and data-intensive applications that delight the user. You will be responsible for crafting the tools used by hundreds of people on a daily basis to maneuver and navigate a US nuclear submarine.

You will be architecting and developing interfaces, state management and access patterns to support data-intensive workflows that are both powerful and approachable. You may spend one day interviewing users to better understand their needs and identifying product gaps to improve. The next day, you might find yourself considering that customer context along with signal gathered from other users with a different skill level, brainstorming approaches to handling intricate UX needs with your teammates.

You’ll regularly be faced with sophisticated technical problems, requiring you to scope out the solution design and finding an incremental path to shipping the new features. As part of this, you will own the design and work with backend engineers in developing them together.

Spear AI servers the national security industry and deploys software to cloud environments that span unclassified, Secret, and Top Secret regions. We also deploy software to the edge in some of the harshest conditions, including US nuclear submarines.

Candidates with a GitHub (or other open-source) profile stand out because we can check their work for attention to detail and code quality.

HTML/CSS (Essential)

• Knowledge of Semantic HTML elements
• Proficient with Tailwind CSS
• Strong CSS fundamentals (Box Model, Flexbox, Grid, Container queries)
• Understanding of CSS Performance (GPU accelerated properties, paint / layout triggers)
• Advanced features such as (`prefers-reduced-motion`, color-scheme, pointer etc.)

Design (Essential)

• Figma and other tools
• Design system and tokens
• Color palette, typography, iconography, spacing, theming, etc.
• Responsive Design
• Page layouts
• UX / User interaction

Front-end (Essential)

• TypeScript
• React / Next.js
• Server-side rendering (SSR)
• React Error boundaries and suspense
• Performance optimization
• Familiar with RESTful APIs (GraphQL is a plus)
• State management (React Context, Zustand, Redux, etc.)

Testing

• Storybook and other tools
• Core Web Vitals
• LCP, TBT, CLS, etc.
• Color contrast and WCAG compliance
• Visual regression testing
• Cross-browser testing
• A/B testing
• CI/CD (GitHub Actions, GitLab Pipelines, etc.)

Product

• Built high-converting landing pages (Hero, Call-to-action, Testimonials, etc.)
• Content management systems (CMS)
• Experience with auth workflows and user onboarding
• Experience with geospatial data and maps
• Experience with complex sorting and filtering

Internationalization

• Localization
• Experience with React-based i18n libraries
• Knowledge of locale-specific formatting for dates, numbers, currencies, etc.
• Translation management

SEO

• Knowledge of SEO best practices and SEO tools
• Static and dynamic metadata
• Open Graph and social media tags