Staff Design Researcher
•Twilio· 2d
🎨 Design⏰ Full-time🎯 Lead / Principal💰 $166k-208k🇺🇸 USA
2d ago
Render·3 months ago
At Render, we’re building the modern cloud platform for developers creating AI-native, full-stack, multi-service applications. Our mission is to eliminate the tradeoff between the power of hyperscalers and the simplicity of developer-friendly platforms—so teams can ship fast, scale reliably, and focus on their product, not infrastructure.
Unlike complex hyperscalers or ephemeral edge/serverless solutions, Render offers a developer-first experience with persistent compute, dynamic autoscaling, built-in orchestration, and observability, allowing teams to launch, scale, and manage real-world applications without writing infrastructure code or managing servers. Whether you're building LLM-powered applications, scalable SaaS products, or async processing pipelines, Render empowers teams to move fast and scale confidently from MVP to millions of users.
Our platform is trusted by over 6 million developers worldwide and continues to grow rapidly. In February 2026, we raised an additional $100M in Series C financing, bringing our total funding to $257M, to accelerate our vision of making cloud infrastructure both powerful and intuitive—designed for the speed of modern AI development.
We’re a diverse and talented team that values craft, velocity, and user experience. If you’re excited to help shape the future of the intelligent cloud and empower developers everywhere, we’d love to hear from you.
We're seeking candidates who possess high integrity, humility, and an insatiable drive to learn. Through reasoned discussions and continuous feedback, we strive to improve both individually and collectively. We foster an environment of mutual trust and respect, empowering effective debate to achieve the best outcomes for our customers and team.
We especially encourage members of underrepresented groups in the tech community to apply and understand that not all successful candidates will meet each requirement listed.
Our interview process is unique to each role, and we value the candidate experience just as much as our customer experience. We hope your conversations with us reflect a thoughtful process that is illuminative, enjoyable, and respectful of your time.
Render's mission is to eliminate the undifferentiated work that goes into building software products by offering an easy-to-use, powerful cloud platform for developer teams of all sizes.
Developer experience is a primary differentiator. We believe the best cloud products are the ones that are straightforward and offer a clear mental model for complex systems. Users should feel in control of a powerful, valuable system of infrastructure capabilities. We're looking for a Staff Design Engineer to be a driving force behind that standard.
This is a senior, high-autonomy role for someone who operates at the intersection of design and engineering as a single discipline. You will own the end-to-end execution of user experiences: from identifying what should exist, to designing how it should feel, to shipping it in production code.
The best design engineers we've seen share a set of traits: they work in high fidelity close to the final medium, they move quickly without compromising on exceptional quality, they obsess over details that most people write off as too expensive, and they ship. They are makers first. This role is built for that kind of person.
Own the quality bar for user experience across the Render product. You'll identify, design, and ship interface improvements end-to-end — from interaction design and visual polish through to production-ready code.
Drive design-led projects with full autonomy. You'll initiate and lead projects that improve how Render looks and feels — the kind of polish, interaction quality, and craft that typically gets deprioritized in an engineering backlog but defines whether a product feels good to use.
Ship production features as a full contributor to the codebase. This isn't a prototyping role. You'll work in our React/TypeScript frontend and collaborate with backend engineers to deliver complete features that serve real users.
Bridge design and engineering, eliminating the gap. You'll partner directly with product designers and engineers, collapsing the distance between intent and implementation. You'll consult on feasibility, push designs further than Figma can express, and prototype in code where it matters.
Elevate craft standards across the team. Through your work, code review, and design feedback, you'll raise the ambient quality of everything Render ships. You'll champion accessibility, performance, animation polish, and the invisible details that make an interface feel alive.
Shape design systems and component architecture. You'll contribute to and evolve our shared design system — not just maintaining it, but ensuring it empowers other engineers and designers to ship at a high quality bar without bottlenecks.
Collaborate with product, design, and engineering leadership on roadmap priorities, ensuring that craft and user experience have a seat at the table alongside feature delivery and infrastructure work.
8+ years of professional experience shipping software products, with significant time spent working at the intersection of design and frontend engineering. You've operated as a design engineer, frontend engineer with strong design sensibility, or a designer who codes — the title matters less than the work.
Exceptional taste and craft. You have an eye for detail that borders on obsessive — typography, spacing, motion, color, interaction feedback. You notice when something is 2px off and it bothers you. You've shipped work that other practitioners admire.
Production-grade frontend engineering skills. Deep fluency in React, TypeScript, CSS, and modern web platform APIs. You write code that is performant, accessible, and maintainable — not just code that looks good in a demo.
Ability to design independently. You can run a design process from problem framing through high-fidelity execution without requiring a designer to hand you a finished comp. You're comfortable in Figma, but you're equally comfortable designing directly in code.
Strong sense of ownership and initiative. You don't wait to be told what to improve. You scan for papercuts, identify opportunities for delight, and ship fixes and improvements proactively.
Experience working in high-fidelity, close to the final medium. You prototype and iterate in the browser, not in slides. You understand that the feel of an interaction can only be evaluated in its real context.
Excellent communication and collaboration skills. You can articulate design rationale to engineers, give constructive design feedback to designers, and advocate for craft in planning conversations with product and leadership.
Experience building developer tools, cloud platforms, or infrastructure products where UX is a competitive advantage.
Track record of open-source contributions, design essays, or creative side projects that demonstrate your craft and point of view.
Experience with animation and interaction design — spring physics, gesture handling, transitions that feel physical and intentional.
Experience building or significantly contributing to a design system at scale.
Familiarity with modern tooling for software build and deploy processes.
Experience in using AI coding agents to accelerate delivery in alignment with best practices for a codebase.
If this role excites you but you don’t meet every single requirement, we’d still love to hear from you—your unique experience might be just what we need.
4 weeks of paid vacation.
14 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all parents to bond with a newly born, adopted, or fostered child. We will also work with you to create a supportive plan of return.
Long-term disability, life insurance, and 401K plans.
100% employer-paid medical coverage and 99% employer-paid dental and vision coverage for you and a dependent. FSAs and HSAs are available as well.
Monthly lifestyle stipend for wellness, mental health and therapy, hobbies, etc.
Monthly cell phone and internet subsidy.
Commuter benefits for Renders in the Bay Area, and home office stipends for remote Renders.
Continuous learning benefits & related support.
This position is generally not eligible for new visa sponsorship. At Render's discretion, the business may sponsor existing visa transfers. Applicants who require sponsorship must receive business authorization.
Render is an equal-opportunity employer. We know that employing a team rich in diverse thoughts, experiences, and opinions allows our employees, product, and community to flourish. We make all employment decisions including hiring, evaluation, termination, promotional, and training opportunities, without regard to race, religion, color, sex, age, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, physical handicap, mental disability, medical condition, disability, gender or identity or expression, pregnancy or pregnancy-related condition, marital status, height and/or weight.
We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.
We encourage all who are interested to apply. We can't wait to hear from you!