Senior Design Engineer

Ready to build software that's accelerating the clean-energy rollout? We're looking for a Senior Design Engineer to own how our product looks and feels, from our small but mighty team in Bristol.

Payaca is the operating system for clean-energy installers, the businesses putting solar, heat pumps, battery storage and EV chargers on homes and businesses across the UK and US. We bring quoting, scheduling, job management, invoicing and compliance into one place built for how these companies actually work.

These are growing businesses that have outgrown spreadsheets and generic trade software. We give them tools designed for their world, so they can win more work, run more efficiently, and scale.

Clean energy is being installed faster than ever, and the installers doing that work are at the centre of it. The better they run, the faster it happens.

This is not a Frontend Engineer with a new job title, and it isn't a designer who prototypes in code. A Design Engineer designs in the medium the product actually ships in. You'll prefer making visual and interaction decisions in the platform they'll be built in, because designing for the web in Figma duplicates effort when you're comfortable implement it too.

Our users are not browsing. They are installers, engineers and office staff running a business inside Payaca all day. That's the design brief: repeat-use business critical software where a saved click compounds hundreds of times a day.

• Take our hardest design problems end to end: shape the problem, decide the design, build it, ship it, and watch how it lands in production
• Grow our design system, balancing consistency with expanding requirements
• Mature our design system, enabling agents and devs to work efficiently across the product
• Raise the floor on quality across the product - the flows that work but feel like hard work
• Design for different usage patterns with varying constraints: back office staff on desktop web, their customers on mobile web, and field engineers on offline first mobile
• Pair with product engineers on the screens they're building, so taste spreads rather than bottlenecks on you
• Use agents to do the volume work - variants, sweeps, migrations - so your own time goes on judgement
• Set the patterns and the bar, through review and through the work itself

React, React Native/Expo, Type Script, Tailwind, Figma

Google Cloud Run, Firebase Hosting, Terraform, CircleCI

Monorepo, pnpm, Mac Book Pro

Claude Code, Claude Agent SDK, Paperclip, Wispr Flow, Git Hub Copilot

• 4+ years shipping production frontend, strong in Type Script, React and CSS
• Visual design taste you can point at - work you designed and built yourself, in the hands of real users
• A track record of owning interface work from a vague brief through to production, resolving most of the ambiguity yourself
• 3+ months getting real work done with AI coding agents, delegating meaningful chunks rather than autocompleting
• Enough range to follow a change past the UI when it needs API or data-model shape to work properly
• A high bar for quality, and the discipline to never merge code you can't stand behind, whether you or an agent wrote it
• A healthy curiosity about clean-energy installers and the businesses they run

• You want to work on the design system full time, rather than on the product with the design system as a means
• You need research and sign-off before you can start building
• You need it perfect before it ships
• You need someone else to break the work down and sequence it for you

How we work

We're an office-first team based in central Bristol. Our office is a short walk from the harbour side, green space, and several food markets.

The…