Design Engineer
- Company
- Method Financial
- Location
- New York, NY
- Work type
- Full Time
- Posted
- 2026-08-26
Job description
About the role
We're hiring Method's first Design Engineer. This is someone who spends most of their time in the code, but with an elite eye and talent for product, visual, and motion design. You'll partner with our Head of Design to own the craft layer across all of Method's web properties: website, design system, demos, and product. You'll work as a duo to set the aesthetic direction, make the technical calls, and ship the work.
Method is a developer-first financial connectivity platform, and our visual identity should feel like it. We want our products to feel precise, technically credible, and genuinely interesting to look at.
We're rebuilding our entire visual and interactive layer at once: a token system covering color (built on perceptual color science), typography, and spacing, a design system from the ground up, a new marketing site, a dashboard with generative UI and charting, and the embedded experience our partners put in front of their own users. Because the embedded product runs inside our partners' apps, it needs to adapt to match their brand, automatically.
You'll work closely with engineers and our Head of Design to bring a level of frontend craft to Method that the current team can't fully own, and oversee a ton of green-space to up-level how customers and end-users interact with Method. Open source is part of this role. We want to build things worth sharing and give Method a point of view the design and creative-coding communities respect.
What you'll do
Own the visual and interactive quality of Method's design system including component states, motion, and consistency across surfaces.
Build shader-based experiences for the website using Three.js and WebGL: hero sections, ambient motion, branded interactive moments.
Redesign and elevate the dashboard beyond a reskin; considered transitions, polished data visualization, generative UI components driven by JSON.
Architect a component library that supports dynamic, on-the-fly UI construction (charts, layouts, elements assembled from structured data).
Make judgment calls on when to invest in bespoke work versus leveraging existing tooling, and communicate those tradeoffs clearly.
Reduce reliance on contractors for production design and front-end UI work.
Collaborate with engineers and Head of Design on design direction; eventually help scope and hire adjacent design talent as the team grows.
Who you are
You have shipped interactive web work that required writing shaders; Three.js, WebGL, GLSL. Your portfolio shows it!
You understand the full stack from GPU rendering to React component architecture; you know why it matters that this runs in-browser and not as a video.
You have strong aesthetic opinions and the technical range to execute them without a dedicated designer handing you comps.
You've built production design systems and component libraries that others actually use.
You're an individual contributor by nature and default to building.
You've worked at or contributed to places with genuine design craft: design studios, developer tooling companies, creative agencies, or strong indie dev work.
You're comfortable being the only person in this specialty for a while; you don't need structure to make progress.
Depth and quality of your experience matter more than years. Apply even if you've never carried the Design Engineer title.
Extra awesome
Background in creative coding, gaming, or CGI; you understand shaders from multiple angles.
Open source contributions to Three.js, shader communities, or creative coding libraries.
Experience with motion design tooling (Rive, Framer, Lottie) and opinions on when to use it versus roll your own.
Experience at companies or studios known for frontend craft
Familiarity with generative UI patterns and JSON-driven component rendering.