Design Engineer (100%)

About rready

At rreadyAI, we build AI-native software that makes corporate innovation measurable, manageable, and truly impactful. We’re a Series A B2B SaaS startup (~30 people) working with global brands like Tetra Pak, BMW, and Swisscom to help their employees turn ideas into real outcomes.

Our platform combines automation, personalization, and data-driven insights to scale idea and innovation management across large organizations. And we don’t just build AI-native products - we also use AI to run smarter internally, applying modern tooling and automation across how we work, collaborate, and ship.

Tasks

The Role

Join us as a Design Engineer and help shape how rready looks, feels, and behaves as we scale our AI-native B2B SaaS platform. You’ll work at the intersection of design and frontend engineering, owning user-facing experiences from early concept to polished, production-ready interfaces.

You don’t just hand off designs. You design in code, build real UI components, and ship them into production so users experience interfaces that are intuitive, accessible, and delightful.

🧩 Perfect for people who care deeply about craft, enjoy strong ownership, and love removing friction between design and engineering, while still spending most of their time building real product UI.

In this hands-on role, you’ll:

• Design and implement user-facing interfaces end-to-end, from idea to production
• Ship production frontend code, not just prototypes or experiments
• Build scalable UI foundations through reusable components, design systems, and continuous refinement

We’re looking for someone who is:

• Craft- and quality-driven, with a bias for finishing things properly
• Comfortable collaborating across Design, Product, and Engineering without heavy handoffs
• Pragmatic: balances visual quality, usability, and technical constraints without over-engineering

Your Responsibilities

• UI & Experience Ownership (Core Focus): Own the end-to-end creation and evolution of user-facing experiences: interaction design, layout, responsiveness, accessibility, and implementation in production. Ensure consistency, usability, and high visual and interaction quality across the product.
• Design Engineering (Production Frontend): Design and build production-ready frontend components and interfaces. You are expected to ship real frontend code regularly, translate design intent directly into implementation, and improve existing UI through refactoring, iteration, and polish.
• Design Systems & Reusable Components: Contribute to and evolve our design system and component library. Build reusable, well-structured UI primitives that scale across products and teams, balancing flexibility with consistency.
• UX, Accessibility & Performance: Ensure interfaces are usable, accessible, and performant. Pay attention to details like states, motion, loading behavior, responsiveness, and edge cases. Continuously improve them over time.
• Prototyping & Exploration: Prototype interactions, flows, and ideas in the medium that makes most sense (Figma, code, or both). Use prototypes to validate ideas early, align stakeholders, and reduce friction before full implementation.
• Frontend Architecture & Quality: Help maintain clean, scalable frontend architecture. Make thoughtful decisions about component structure, state management, styling, and maintainability to support long-term product growth.
• Documentation & UI Standards: Create and maintain documentation for UI patterns, components, and usage guidelines so design and engineering decisions are easy to understand, repeat, and evolve. Especially in a distributed team.
• Tooling & Continuous Improvement: Identify friction in design-to-code workflows, improve tooling and processes, and help the team ship higher-quality UI faster. Continuously refine how we design and build interfaces.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with Product Managers, Designers, Backend Engineers, and other stakeholders to shape features early, align on intent, and ensure what ships matches the original vision from concept to production.

Requirements

Who You Are

• User- and experience-driven: You care deeply about great user experience. You know that clarity, usability, accessibility, and performance are just as important as visual polish.
• End-to-end ownership mindset: You take responsibility for what ships from early ideas and interaction design to production-ready frontend code. You don’t throw designs over the fence; you build, refine, and ship them.
• Design + frontend hybrid: You’re comfortable both designing interfaces and implementing them in code. Whether you lean more design or more engineering, you enjoy working in the overlap.
• Frontend-capable (not design-only): You confidently write and ship production frontend code, review PRs, debug UI issues, and improve existing components and interfaces over time.
• Structured & detail-strong: You pay attention to the details that make products feel right: Spacing, states, edge cases, responsiveness, accessibility, and consistency across the system.
• Proactive & accountable: You drive topics forward independently, identify UX or UI issues early, and follow through until things are done properly.
• Iteration-first mindset: You enjoy experimenting, refining, and improving designs and implementations over time. You value progress and learning over chasing perfection.
• Calm in ambiguity: When requirements are fuzzy or problems are not fully defined, you help create clarity through sketches, prototypes, and incremental implementation.
• Tool-savvy & craft-oriented: You’re comfortable working with design and frontend tooling (e.g. Figma, component libraries, frontend frameworks) and you care about clean, maintainable UI code.
• Strong communicator: You communicate clearly with Designers, Product Managers, and Engineers, and help align intent, constraints, and outcomes through transparent collaboration.
• Language: Fluent in English (German is a plus).

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working as a Design Engineer, Frontend Engineer with strong design skills, or Product Designer who codes.
• Strong experience with modern frontend development (e.g. TypeScript, Vue.js or similar frameworks)
• Solid understanding of UI/UX principles, interaction design, and accessibility
• Experience building or contributing to design systems and reusable component libraries
• Comfort translating product and design intent directly into production-ready UI
• Experience collaborating closely with Product and Engineering in cross-functional teams
• Experience in fast-paced environments (startup, scale-up, or product-driven teams) is a plus
• Strong interest in continuous improvement. You enjoy making interfaces clearer, more usable, and easier to build over time

Benefits

What We Offer

• A high-impact role in an AI-native B2B SaaS startup where your work directly improves how users experience rready from clarity and usability to visual polish and interaction quality.
• Real ownership of user-facing experiences: from early concepts and interaction design to production-ready frontend implementation, with the mandate to continuously raise the quality of our UI and UX.
• A role at the intersection of Design and Frontend Engineering: you’ll design interfaces and ship production frontend code, ideal if you enjoy end-to-end responsibility from idea to shipped experience.
• The opportunity to build scalable UI foundations: design systems, reusable components, patterns, documentation, and tooling that reduce friction and improve quality across product teams.
• A truly international team, with colleagues from Switzerland, Germany, Namibia, Greece, Brazil, the Netherlands, and more.
• Enterprise exposure through close collaboration with our product and customer-facing teams supporting accounts such as BMW, Tetra Pak, Swisscom, Implenia, or LGT, with real-world requirements around usability, accessibility, and consistency at scale.
• A flexible work setup with the autonomy and trust needed to do focused, high-quality work and iterate thoughtfully on real user problems.
• Memorable team events from ski trips to our annual offsite abroad. Work hard, grow fast, and celebrate success together!

rready was established as a successful spin-out from the Swiss leading telco-provider, Swisscom. Our goal: supporting large organizations by enabling their employees to become innovators through our employee-driven innovation suite, which is tailored to meet specific needs. rready Idea Management helps organizations to source and manage ideas effectively. Our proven KICKBOX innovation method enables the validation and implementation of these ideas; and in combination, the solutions can be seamlessly integrated to enhance innovation performance across the entire organization.

Throughout this process, rready provides both strategic and hands-on support to help companies foster cultural transformation, generate tangible ROI, and improve employer branding while leveraging bottom-up innovation. Today, rready serves over 40 clients in 15 different countries across various industries, including renowned companies such as BMW, Swisscom and TetraPak.