Senior Design Engineer | Deel

Location: New York

Role: Senior Design Engineer

Company: Deel

Location: United Kingdom, Israel, Portugal, Spain, Czech Republic, Poland, France, Switzerland, Hungary, Ireland, Sweden, Germany or Estonia

Job Type: Full-time

About Deel

Deel is the all-in-one payroll and HR platform for global teams. HRIS, payroll, compliance, benefits, performance and equipment management sit in one product. It supports every worker type in 150+ countries. In 2024, Deel paid $11.2 billion to workers in nearly 100 currencies and provided healthcare and benefits in 109 countries.

The company has a $17.3 billion valuation and reached $1 billion in ARR in just over five years. About 7,000 people work at Deel, across more than 100 countries and 74 languages. Customers rate it 4.83 on average, from 15,000 reviews on G2, Trustpilot, Capterra, Apple and Google.

Most teams use AI as a faster way for humans to build products. Deel wants to go further and build the system that lets AI build the products. Humans set the taste, the guardrails and the standards it works within.

That system is your product. You build what AI generates against: the design system and component architecture, the generation and agent workflows, the quality gates that keep output production-ready, and the feedback loops that keep it all visible to the team. You stay hands-on as a designer, because the quickest way to prove the system works is to ship real interfaces on top of it.

This is a senior individual contributor role in Product Design. You split your time between Figma and a code editor in roughly equal measure. You work directly with design leadership to drive AI adoption across the whole design organisation, and you sit in a cross-functional team with Engineering and Product.

What you are expected to do:

Build the system

• Architect the design system, tokens and components as the substrate AI generates against.

• Design prompt libraries, patterns and agent workflows that turn design intent into production-ready UI with minimal human assembly.

Prove it by designing

• Stay a practising designer. Explore concepts quickly and design real interfaces.

• Prototype in production front-end code. You are the first and toughest test of whether the system produces excellent, shippable work.

Own quality, guardrails and evals

• Define production-readiness criteria for AI-generated UI.

• Set design-to-code fidelity benchmarks, regression safeguards and evaluation methods that keep AI output honest. Speed must not cost craft.

Drive the AI workflow across the design org

• Work with design leadership to maintain, evolve and roll out the AI-native workflow across the whole design organisation, not only your own work.

• Treat it as an ongoing responsibility. Drive adoption, keep standards current as tools change, and embed the workflow across teams so it never depends on one person.

Work across functions

• Collaborate closely with Engineering, Product and design-system contributors. You complement engineering and do not replace it.

• Keep the system round-tripping to shared surfaces such as Figma. AI-accelerated output stays visible and open to feedback, never a black box.

Push into generative UI

• Take AI beyond the build process and into the product itself.

• Prototype and evaluate adaptive, AI-generated interfaces as a product capability, and help decide where they belong on the roadmap.

Level up the team

• Turn what works into playbooks, prompt libraries and enablement. The wider design org builds on the system and does not depend on you. The goal is durable capability, not tool dependency.

What you need to succeed:

• You move fluidly between design and code. You don't need to be the deepest specialist in either. You can design something well, build it yourself, and use AI to move quickly between the two.

• You have real…