About 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.
About the Role
- The role is for a Design Engineer to own the core Restate UI, design, and code.
- The UI is a live window onto a distributed system where data is large, changes constantly, and users are often in a hurry.
- You will hold the product end to end, covering both design decisions and the code that ships them, to ensure technical complexity continues to feel simple.
- This role offers a front-row seat to the shift toward durable runtimes as foundational infrastructure for AI applications.
- Restate re-imagines durable execution as a lightweight self-contained stack—no database required—and ships as a single Rust binary with an optimized custom storage layer, low latency orchestration, and an analytics engine for observability.
- Restate is used by Fortune 500 companies, including Tier 1 banks running critical financial workflows, and by cutting-edge AI and infra startups.
- You will partner with engineers who have built foundational systems at scale, including the creators of Apache Flink and leaders from Meta’s messaging infrastructure.
- This role is not for those who want to lead a design team rather than be the senior IC doing the work.
- This role is not for those who expect a finished design to hand off or heavy direction.
- This role is not for designers who do not code, or engineers who do not sweat the visual details.
- This role is not for those uninterested in technical subject matter.
- Location: remote in Europe preferred; US remote for exceptional candidates.
- Travel: minimal; occasional team offsites.
What You'll Be Doing
- Architect, design, and ship the core Restate UI, from whiteboarding sessions with engineers to production-ready code.
- Show what the system is actually doing, including execution timelines, retries, queues, state, and failures.
- Build for data at scale, including large result sets, live updates, filtering, search, and the charts and timelines that sit on top of them.
- Design the states nobody designs, such as loading, empty, partial, error, one result, and far too many.
- Keep the UI fast so it feels like a low latency runtime, making design decisions regarding rendering cost, data loading, and perceived latency.
- Keep one mental model where developers meet the same concepts in the UI, the SDKs, and the docs, named and presented the same way.
- Bring durable execution to life visually, maintaining the design bar for simplicity.
- Build scalable Design Systems in code, including reusable components and patterns for architecture, code, and interactive elements.
What You'll Bring
Production front-end skills in React, TypeScript, and modern HTML/CSS, with the ability to take a feature from concept through to shipped and deployed yourself.
A portfolio of shipped work that shows both the craft and the code.
Strong design sensibility and a high visual bar that you can hold across the whole product without waiting for direction.
Information design skills, including hierarchy, density, and progressive disclosure, to turn large amounts of data into something readable.
Experience with data-intensive interfaces, including datasets bigger than the viewport, pagination, virtualization, filtering, search, and charts built on real data.
Front-end performance expertise, including profiling and fixing slow rendering, long lists, wasted re-renders, and bundle size.
Visual storytelling for technical concepts.
Motion design ability built in code to communicate state, time, and dynamism.
Ability to build Design Systems in code using components and patterns that stay coherent.
Ability to read beyond the front end, including API specs, queries, and backend code.
AI literacy to multiply your own impact and unblock yourself.
Nice to Have
Prior work on developer tools, infrastructure, or AI products.
Data visualization experience involving timelines, traces, graphs, and time series.
Focus on accessibility and keyboard-first interfaces.
Creative development experience in 3D, generative, or game-like web work (Three.js, GLSL shaders, etc.).
Comfort reaching into the backend when a feature needs it.
Experience deploying and owning serverless components like Cloudflare Workers, Vercel, or similar, with a grasp of edge runtimes, caching, and cold starts.