Senior Design Engineer

Role: Senior Design Engineer

Company: Desai Holding S.a.r.l.

Location: Luxembourg, Luxembourg

Coming from abroad (>150km from Luxembourg)? We offer an attractive relocation package, including the possibility to benefit from Luxembourg’s impatriate tax regime where applicable.

Who we are

At Desai, we leverage AI to simplify home furnishing. In today’s world of overwhelming choices, our technology combines computer vision and AI to offer personalised interior design tailored to each individual.

As a startup, we’re a small, passionate, and driven team with deep experience, having worked together at a leading computer vision unicorn and a global e-commerce player, and successfully pushed the boundaries of what’s possible with AI. Now, we’re setting our sights on making professional-grade interior design scalable and accessible to the everyday consumer as a B2B2C platform.

We are looking for a T-shaped builder who can move fluidly between front-end engineering, product/UI design and product thinking, and who wants to take meaningful ownership of a live product rather than operate within a narrow functional handoff. If that sounds like you, we’d love to connect!

What we believe in

At Desai, we share a set of core values which we are committed to upholding:

· Always Challenge: We value the courage to speak up and challenge ideas, knowing that constructive dissent leads to better outcomes.

· Work Together: We strongly believe in the power of diverse, cross-functional teams and prioritise helping one another.

· Strive for Excellence: We are committed to doing our best in all that we do, constantly pushing boundaries.

· Collaborate Openly: We embrace openness, both within our team and with industry partners, to drive innovation.

· Stay Ahead: We stay agile, curious and prepared for the unexpected in a fast-changing environment.

What you will do

We're seeking a Senior Design Engineer: a T-shaped product builder who sits at the intersection of product design and front-end engineering. This is not a conventional front-end role with some added UI responsibility, and it is not a product designer role that ends at a Figma handoff. You will move from problem framing and exploration through interaction design, prototyping and production implementation.

You will inherit Desai's live React/TypeScript product and take long-term ownership of how it feels and works. You will understand both the user problem and the technical shape of the product, including data models, APIs, AI capabilities, state, performance and implementation constraints, and use that understanding to design experiences that are both intuitive and technically sound.

You will work closely with the CEO, Engineering team and Head of AI, often designing directly in code and using Figma or lightweight prototypes where they help exploration. The goal is to reduce the traditional design-to-engineering handoff and have one person carry important product experiences from idea to shipped software.

On a day-to-day basis you will

• Own important product experiences end to end, from problem framing and solution exploration to interaction design, prototyping and production front-end implementation.
• Take over, understand and continuously improve an existing production codebase, balancing refactoring with delivery rather than rebuilding for the sake of it.
• Explore multiple ways to solve a problem, sketch or prototype quickly, compare trade-offs and turn the strongest direction into a polished product experience.
• Design and implement complex interfaces in React/TypeScript, including AI-powered flows, rich interactions and states that make sophisticated system behaviour understandable to users.
• Build and evolve our design system, both the visual language and the reusable React components behind it, so the team can ship faster and more consistently.
• Sweat the details of the experience: information hierarchy, spacing, typography, motion, feedback, empty/loading/error states, accessibility, responsive behaviour and cross-browser quality.
• Engage deeply with engineering and AI constraints, understanding how data structures, APIs, model capabilities and performance limitations should shape the interface rather than designing in isolation from them.
• Set a high quality bar across implementation, code review, automated testing, performance, maintainability and visual consistency, and verify that what ships matches the intended experience.
• Use product analytics, hands-on product use and user feedback to identify friction, validate decisions and continuously improve existing flows.
• Help raise the team's product and design-engineering standards through thoughtful reviews, clear rationale and pragmatic experimentation with new tools and approaches.

This role is ideal for someone who cares equally about what should be built, how it should feel and how it should work in production; and who enjoys owning all three rather than handing work from one discipline to another.

Tech stack

Our stack is deliberately not set in stone. We care more about strong engineering and design judgement than matching one exact tool history, and we are open to changing tools when a better one is clearly right for the job. You should be comfortable working across production and design code rather than treating them as separate phases.

• Design & prototyping: Figma, rapid code-based prototyping in React
• Build & front-end: Vite, React.js, TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML/CSS
• State & data fetching: Redux, React Query
• Testing: Vitest, Testing Library, Playwright
• Back-end platform: Supabase
• Product analytics: PostHog
• Cloud & delivery: AWS Amplify, CloudFront, Cloudflare DNS
• Collaboration & version control: Git

What you’ll bring

· 7+ years designing and building production web products, with meaningful hands-on experience across both front-end engineering and product/UI design.

· Strong product design fundamentals: interaction design, user flows, information architecture, visual hierarchy, prototyping and the judgement to simplify complex workflows without losing important capability.

· Strong React and TypeScript skills and the ability to implement the experiences you design as high-quality production software rather than handing them off for someone else to interpret.

· A T-shaped systems mindset: deep expertise at the design/front-end intersection, with enough technical breadth to reason about data models, APIs, application state, AI capabilities, performance and implementation trade-offs.

· A proven ownership mindset: you are comfortable inheriting an existing codebase and product, understanding why it works the way it does and improving both the experience and implementation incrementally over time.

· Excellent visual and interaction craft, including experience creating or evolving reusable component systems or design systems and a willingness to care about the details users actually feel.

· High engineering standards across code review, automated testing, accessibility, maintainability and root-cause problem solving.

· Startup pragmatism, autonomy and strong collaboration skills, with the judgement to move quickly, explain trade-offs clearly and work closely with business, product, AI and engineering without rigid role boundaries.

Please include a portfolio or links to products, interfaces or design systems you have personally designed and built. We are specifically looking for evidence that you can carry work from design thinking into functioning software.

What will make you stand out

· Experience taking a new product or major product experience from an existing concept through 0-to-1 design and implementation.

· Experience with Three.js, WebGL or Canvas, particularly for floorplans, spatial interfaces, 2D/3D visualisation, animation or other graphics-heavy product experiences.

· Experience with multi-tenant architecture, especially a single monorepo serving multiple tenants or branded product experiences.

· Experience designing AI-powered products or other technically complex interfaces where the UX must communicate system capabilities, uncertainty, state and constraints clearly.

We encourage people from all backgrounds and cultures to apply. English is mandatory.

What’s in it for you

Compensation and ownership

• Competitive salary compensation
• Equity participation
• If relocating from abroad (>150km from Luxembourg), potential access to Luxembourg’s impatriate tax regime, subject to eligibility

Time off and flexible working

• 26 days paid annual leave + bank holidays
• Flexible hours and hybrid working (depending on location)
• Leave to support you when you need it, including sick pay, compassionate leave, or paid time-off to recharge after an intense work period