Senior Design Engineer

• As a Senior Design Engineer (f/m/x), you will have a true impact in changing how companies transform mindsets and behavior across their entire workforce globally
• You will play a key role in contributing to the design and delivery of our hybrid human + AI coaching experience, and you will primarily be responsible for designing and shipping high-quality product experiences, and enabling our Product Engineers to build them consistently and at pace
• You do this by supporting our client companies to drive their strategic initiatives and employee development initiatives by using Sharpist’s unique approach primed with digital coaching cemented by a strong learner experience fuelled by our Sharpist apps
• This means you get to work with some of the most exciting brands in DACH and globally, including names such as IKEA, LVMH or GetYourGuide
• In your role you will design and ship solutions across our product — web and mobile learner app, coach and internal platforms, and enterprise client dashboard
• You won’t be boxed into one area: you work on whatever matters most in the moment, from the learner-facing moments people love to the workflows behind the scenes
• Operating in the overlap between design and code, you own the full cycle — framing the problem, shaping the solution, prototyping in code, and often shipping it to production yourself, working closely with the lead designer and product engineers
• A big part of this role is enablement. We already have a robust design system — components and patterns live in the codebase and Storybook — and a lead designer who owns the design vision
• Your job is to close the gaps between design intent and what actually ships, and build the workflows and guardrails that let Product Engineers prototype and ship on-brand features without a designer in the loop for every change
• Alongside the lead designer, you help raise the bar for the design quality of what engineering ships — through review, pairing, and shared standards
• You also surface problems worth solving (from research, design gaps, and other signals) for the team to consider
• You bring a forward-looking, AI-native approach to how we discover, prototype, validate, and ship, and you don’t compromise on excellent craft
• Within 1 month, you will…
• Get a complete understanding of our product surfaces beginning with learner mobile and web apps, and enterprise dashboard: who uses what, on which platform, and what success looks like
• Get familiar with our codebase and front-end stack, and ship your first small, polished changes to production
• Run a lightweight product + UX audit across the areas you touch, documenting gaps, friction points, and opportunities for improvement — including where our design language and components are inconsistent or missing
• Get to know how the product trio works — how we source problems, craft them, and run spikes — and start contributing your own observations
• Establish your AI-in-design-and-build workflow (e.g. research synthesis, prototyping acceleration, AI-assisted coding) and share it with the team so others can benefit
• Within 1 quarter, you will…
• Own an end-to-end cycle: run discovery (or a design spike), translate insights into clear design decisions, and drive them through to delivery — building in the codebase alongside (or ahead of) the product engineers
• Improve how our existing components and patterns get used in practice — making them easier to reach for, and helping Product Engineers build with them consistently and correctly
• Help make our design quality bar explicit and shared with engineering, so it shows up consistently in what gets shipped
• Introduce at least one AI-assisted workflow that improves speed and/or quality (for example: AI-accelerated synthesis of qualitative research, faster prototyping, or content exploration)
• Partner with engineering (who also own data) to define what to measure and how to validate impact
• Within 1 year, you will…
• Take ownership across whichever product areas need you most, become a reliable source of well-framed problems for the trio, and help shape the vision for Sharpist’s hybrid human + AI coaching experience
• Create and standardize design patterns for our hybrid coaching experience (including conversational/adaptive AI interactions), while keeping the coach and learner in control
• Build and own the workflows around our design system, so Product Engineers can ship on-brand, on-vision features fast — with a clear path to the right components, sensible guardrails, and shared standards
• Raise the design quality of what engineering ships: lead by example, guide Product Engineers’ delivery through crit and pairing, and help others build with clarity and confidence — in close partnership with the lead designer
• And then, what’s next?
• Use your product design engineering expertise to help shape the right direction for broader business impact
• Extend your influence across the product — from the learner hybrid coaching experience to coach and enterprise surfaces, wherever the biggest opportunities are

Benefits

• Flexible working hours
• Have your own certified coach with unlimited sessions
• Hybrid working model
• Employee library
• Company pension scheme
• Free mate, beers & muesli

Strong writing and communication skills in EnglishComfort owning the end-to-end cycle in a lean product trio (lead designer, lead engineer, senior front-end engineer) with no PM layer — iterating quickly, sometimes side-by-side with engineering, sometimes shipping it yourself5+ years spanning product design and front-end engineering — you both design and ship (ideally across mobile and web)A track record of proactively identifying problems worth solving, not only executing on a defined briefProficiency with FigmaBased in Berlin or willing to relocate (hybrid working model)You don’t need to check every box. If you’re a strong designer who ships, or a strong front-end engineer with real design taste, we want to hear from youProficiency building in production front-end code (React / TypeScript / CSS), with a focus on interaction, polish, and performance — comfortable owning a change from Figma through to a merged PRAn AI-native workflow: you routinely use AI to accelerate your process (research synthesis, prototyping, coding, content exploration) in a way that improves quality, not just speedComfort working with an established design system in code — applying its components and patterns well, spotting where they fall short, and keeping design and build in syncA dual portfolio: strong UX and UI fundamentals and strong end-to-end thinking (problem framing, flow, interaction, visual execution), plus examples of front-end code and interfaces you’ve shipped to productionExperience designing (or strong informed opinions about) conversational / LLM-based experiences and the UX patterns they requireExperience helping raise the design/quality bar for other people’s delivery — through review, crit, pairing, or design-system contribution — as an individual contributor rather than a managerExperience with Tech/SaaS and L&D/HRExperience designing B2B/enterprise dashboards or data-heavy interfacesFamiliarity with motion/animation, design tokens, Storybook, or component toolingComfort with low-code / no-code and AI build tooling as a way to ship and prototype fasterGreat presentation skills and confidence when engaging with decision-makersGerman language skills are a plus