Design Engineer; Senior

We're looking for a Senior Design Engineer to help shape the next generation of our maritime domain awareness platform.

Spear AI builds the data management and AI systems behind real-world maritime missions. Our sonobuoy sensors collect edge data in the water; our software helps the U.S. Navy turn that data into decisions. The work is technical, the problem space is dense, and the stakes are real. We ship in months, not years, and the people using what we build are operators, analysts, and warfighters.

We operate with a flat structure - you'll work directly with leadership, set technical direction on the surfaces you own, and help shape how Design Engineering operates at Spear AI as the team grows.

Design Engineers at Spear work across the company, contributing to branding, marketing, product development, and our internal design system.

We’re a small team wearing many hats, and you’d have a wide variety of responsibilities that include:

• Design and implement complex, data-rich product surfaces on Horizon, our maritime acoustic data platform, from first sketch to production.

• Spot opportunities to redesign or refine key features and flows, as well as smaller quality issues and “paper cuts”.

• Sit in kickoffs, understand the product and the audience, and propose how it should look and feel. You're not waiting for a spec - you're helping write it.

• Champion performance, accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA), and maintainability as first-class concerns, not afterthoughts.

• Set the bar through review and mentorship. Run design audits and pull request reviews that level up the people around you.

• Have a voice in how Design Engineering scales at Spear AI.

We care more about depth and taste than years on a resume, but successful candidates typically have 7+ years of design engineering (design/front of frontend) experience, including time spent operating at a senior IC level on a high-bar team.

• You have a deep understanding of design workflows and the technical constraints that surround them.

• You sweat the small stuff: animation, loading states, typography rhythm, accessibility, responsiveness, and performance.

• You've substantially shaped or maintained a design system at scale, not just consumed one. You think hard about component API design, token architecture, accessibility primitives, and how a system holds up under pressure across many teams and applications.

• You have the courage to ask questions, experiment, and advocate for what you feel is right.

• You've mentored other designers and/or frontend engineers, set patterns others adopted, and made teammates better through your reviews and your work.

• You thrive in ambiguity. Mission-critical work in defense isn't always tidy. Priorities shift. You stay calm, adjust, and iterate.

• You make the team better. On a team of two, every hire shapes how we work. You bring your own strengths but check your ego at the door. You give honest feedback, take it just as well, and treat your teammates' wins as your own. The work we ship is a reflection of how we work together.

• Expertise with Tailwind CSS and deep understanding of modern CSS fundamentals and layouts (container queries, cascade, specificity, OKLCH, view transitions, flex, grid, etc.).

• Strong grasp of accessibility standards (WCAG 2.2) and performance metrics (Core Web Vitals, Lighthouse).

• Experience with frontend technologies like React, Next.js, and Type Script.

• Excellent communication skills. You can explain a technical decision, a design rationale, or a trade-off in writing in a way that lands with the audience.

• Demonstrated experience designing and building design systems/component libraries used by other engineering teams.

• A solid background in Product/UI Design with a strong sense of layout, color theory, typography, and visual hierarchy.

• Fluency in Figma — including variables, modes, auto layout, and component architecture that mirrors code.

• Comfort designing data-dense interfaces — tables, charts, dashboards, real-time displays.

• Geospatial / mapping experience (Mapbox, Map Libre, deck.gl, Cesium).

• Experience shipping in regulated or secure environments (defense,…