We’re kicking this newsletter up again, experimenting with getting into a regular cadence of sharing cool events, design engineering opportunities, and highlighting stories/journeys of other design engineers in the space. We’d love to hear your feedback on how this newsletter can be valuable to you. Just hit reply to get in touch with us.

With that, here’s our March 2026 issue.

recent highlights

Last fall, design eng club co-hosted some events in SF and NYC!

Building Interactive Interfaces + Art, at telos.haus, in NYC

We hosted a cozy demo night in Brooklyn where we had some creatives from the community share the cool things they’ve been working on! Here’s all the demos:

• Chia did a cool interactive art performance, called desktop dreaming, a system built from 100+ personal sketches

• Emily & Justin presented portrait of you, living digital portraits that detoritate based on screen time.

• Mathurah demoed Figma for words, a spatial canvas that transforms a sentence across an axis to adjust tone, complexity, and emotional resonance

• Anna made a collaborative digital garden that anyone on the internet can add flowers to (but they have to be flowers!)

  

• Christina shared recursive flora, a zine and data visualization app centered around overthinking

• Tina built a teenage-engineering inspired mixer that makes cool combinations of melodies and music

• Vardnan created an AI reading tool grounded in the principles of learning and cognitive science

• Connie shared link dump an ephemeral link canvas that stops you from hoarding links forever, that acts as a transient file storage for creatives

• Helen presented called home, an interactive, poetic web experience reflecting on the end of life

• Filip prototyped a new way to visualize AI thinking states with a blurred streaming carousel

Design Eng Roundtable: Building Agentic Interfaces, SF

Flo & Anna from paradigm hosted a design engineering rountable focused on designing for agentic interfaces. The awesome panelists were Ilan Bigio (OpenAI), Liam Matteson (Browserbase), Anna Monaco (Paradigm), Jason Ginsberg (Cursor), and Silas Alberti (Cognition).

Read the takeaways here!

upcoming events

• SF: Next Wednesday, March 11th, we’re hosting an evening around the untold origins of the smartphone - RSVP here!

We’re bringing together a room full of designers, engineers, and creatives to screen the award-winning General Magic documentary: the story of the 1990s Apple spin-off that built the precursor to the modern smartphone 15 years too early. They pioneered touchscreens, icons, email, and early app ecosystems. While the company dissolved in 2002, its alumni went on to create the iPod, iPhone, Android, eBay, and Nest.

The screening will be preceded by a live panel conversation with General Magic’s co-founder and CEO, Marc Porat, along with Mike Stern, early General Magic team member and movie producer, moderated by Soleio.

Will be a cozy event with limited spots, register asap if you’re in town and want to join!

resources & cool reads

Design engineering takes a village! Sharing some cool articles/resources we’ve come across in the wild that might be cool to check out. If you have any recs, reply here so we can include them in the next issue:

• Design Engineering, living notes and links, by Flo

• Building Halftone Effects with Shaders, by Maxime

• Interface Craft by Josh

• Thread on resources for design engineering, by Raul

• User interface.wiki

• Going Beyond Prototyping - Interview with Nate Parrot, Anthropic

• The design process is dead, here’s what’s replacing it - Interview with Jenny Wen, Anthropic

opportunities

Some open roles for design engineers! Reach out to us if you have a role you’d like to submit for the next newsletter.

• The Browser Company is hiring design engineers to shape the look and feel of the Dia browser

• Interaction Co. is hiring design engineers to work on the web app/iOS experience for Poke (poke.com). Email miles@interaction.co if you’re interested in the role!

• Vercel is seeking both designers and design engineers to work on Vercel and V0.

• Doji, a fashion app, is hiring design engineers to work its Doji mobile experience.

• Sway is looking for a design engineer to help make democracy look good.

• Profound is hiring a design engineer to lead the design of their marketing website.

• Google Design is hiring for their creative fellowship.

• Github is hiring design engineers to work on the future of software dev.

• Braintrust is hiring design engineers to work on their AI observability & evals platform.

• Trajectory is looking for Product and Design Engineers to dream of and build the interface for continual learning

see you on the internet!

In the meantime, keep building cool things—and if you come across interesting design engineering work, opportunities, or resources, send them our way. We read every reply.

We’re also rolling out invites to our online community on a rolling basis. Join here!

Before my days as an engineer, I was a pianist for a string orchestra in high school. In one of my first concerts with the orchestra, the cramped stage was getting set up, and our budget keyboard was a misstep away from breaking. I’d rehearsed for the Harry Potter theme song and was still gathering my nerves when someone tripped over the keyboard’s wire, snapping it in two.

This was a problem—that was our only keyboard, and it just lost access to electricity. A contagious panic broke out. As it spread, it reached a cellist’s dad who came by. He diagnosed the situation, bit into the plug and re-attached its inner wires. He grabbed secondhand tape from an unused percussive instrument, wrapped the wires, and then pressed the power button. It turned on.

I asked him how he fixed it. He responded “I’m an engineer”. It was hard not to feel inspired by his Marvel-like moment. I immediately found conviction in wanting to be an engineer and help solve problems for others like he did for me.

I studied software engineering at the University of Waterloo. Coding felt magical—my first “Hello world” in Java quickly evolved into a plethora of index.html files, writing scripts to find free food on campus from events and regular overnight hackathons. My days eventually evolved into days full of software engineering, from a Google internship day job to evening development work for Hack the North.

But I had a hard time finding passion in my software engineering roles. I couldn’t see how my work was “fixing the wire” for others. I was convinced that I needed to move up the tech stack and become a designer to be closer to the user.

I bought Sketch and tried mastering the tool by making a sketch a day for 30 days. I spent two years trying to build a portfolio and gaining design experience, including an engineering internship role at pre-launch Figma and designing for Hack the North. And then I finally nabbed a formal design internship.

The role was what I imagined it to be—I was designing the UI that a user was interacting with. I was closer than ever to the user. I could see how people used my work. Although it was the day to day I expected, it still didn’t itch my desire to “fix the wire”.

This search continued for a few years. My journey spanned a wide range of roles, spanning software engineering at both large and small companies like Google and Figma, design at Quora, and product management at Uber. I even joined as the only engineer and designer at a YC startup and saw the product eventually get acquired after three years.

After that startup stint, I was on the job market looking for a new role. My core interest remained around solving real problems for users through a product.

The problem is that the job market is unforgiving for people who change roles. When I was applying, both software engineering and PM roles required many years of industry experience. I had neither, having worked as the only software engineer and designer for 3 years at a startup and having 3 years of product management experience, despite having 6 years of total industry experience. A hybrid role would have been a dream come true, but this wasn’t a standard role to have at a company.

I’d get far into interviews, only to get rejected because I didn’t have enough experience in the specialized role despite enough industry experience. I also applied to many PM roles but didn’t find a good fit due to my lack of recent PM experience. I was stuck between the cracks of engineering, product and design, having the skills to build a great product but not being the “right fit”.

Eventually, I started finding roles that fit between the cracks. While playing in a basketball rec league, I shared my situation and talked to my teammates about my ideal role. They didn’t have a job posting for that role but they saw the value in it. That conversation led to an interview the same week and an offer the following week. That’s when I joined Windsurf, then known as Codeium. Today, our main product is the Windsurf Editor, a VS Code fork with an agent that understands your codebase and your intent, providing you with the ability to build 10x faster.

The team was a small scrappy team of around 20 when I joined so there wasn’t a point in focusing on a single part of the tech stack. Similar to my past experiences, no problem felt like someone else’s problem—we were all given full agency to solve any problems that could improve the product. The breadth of my past experience across different roles gave me a lens on the engineering team’s problems. For example, how can you use design to improve the failure modes of tool calls? How do you compress a plethora of functionality in a fraction of the screen space? How do you design a human-in-the-loop experience for developers to seamlessly collaborate with an agent?

The role evolved into a state of mind instead of state of ownership. The focus of my role was “how can Windsurf bring as much delight to the user as possible?” instead of “own the design or code for this feature”. I define this focus as the role of a design engineer.

My goal as a design engineer has always been about how to solve problems for users. I spend my days reading through bug reports, feedback, both internal and external, looking at data, and trying to find elegant solutions to the problems I see. The solution space presented is never limited to just code—sometimes, it's a copy change or a design tweak, or it could be an entire facelift. Other times, it’s a combination of both design and engineering. Limiting yourself to one axis of change can limit you to a local maxima. Rotating through different perspectives as an engineer, designer and PM allows me to find a global maximum for our users.

Unlike traditional design or engineering functions, the power of a design engineer is the breadth of skills we have. Areas of ownership make sense when expertise is needed. However, there’s so much more to a delightful user experience than code or designs. It’s the ability to see through the cracks and to fill in the details that make an experience feel complete. It’s the ability to not only answer the “how” you do it, but the who, what, and why.

To fulfill this need, design engineers are not required to be experts of their tools unlike the traditional roles of software engineers or designers. Instead, they should be able to learn to bridge gaps, understand the user and create delight. Design engineers should be able to start backwards from the user and have a vision for the experience and then picking the tools, existing or new, to bring the vision to a reality.

What makes the role so exciting is that learning is a prerequisite of the role. There’s no unified form factor for solutions—solutions are bespoke for the problems that arise. The engineer that fixed my keyboard was never trained to bite into a plug. It was a means to an end—to bring delight to the end user and to solve a problem.

Bridging the gaps to create user delight is difficult. It’s what makes design engineering so difficult yet important. But why is design engineering rising today?

A lot of it can be attributed to the rise of AI tooling and model intelligence improving. As AI tooling becomes more powerful, the floor for skill sets becomes lower. Breadth will also always be valuable due to the unique perspective it brings. As a result, having breadth is increasingly important because the combination of its unique perspective and a greater ability to apply skills through AI tooling is key to finding a global maxima in product experiences for users.

This definition has increasingly become a dream role for me. Domain expertise is extremely important, but its ceiling on user impact is limited by the lack of breadth. I’ve had the chance to develop depth in many functions as a software engineer, product designer and a product manager professionally and to be able to marry all of those interests in one challenging role at Windsurf has given me a peek at what future product development teams could look like.

For anyone who also obsesses over the impact of their work on users, I encourage you to discover the broad world of design engineering, a state of mind focused on working backwards from the end vision instead of a focus on how to apply existing tools for new problems, a state of mind focused on questioning beyond just the “how” but also the who, what, and why.

Thank you for reading about my journey becoming a design engineer. If you’re interested in helping shape the future of software development, join us as a design engineer at Windsurf!

–

Andy Zhang
Twitter / Substack

For more updates on design engineering, follow @designengclub on X.

Hi everyone,

We’re so excited by all the interest and momentum around the design engineering community! It’s been incredible to see how many of you are eager to connect at this intersection of product, design, and engineering. This is all still an experiment, and we’re learning as we go :)

Slack Invites

We’re sending out Slack invites in smaller waves to keep the conversation more engaging. We're prioritizing folks who are excited to actively contribute, so if you’re not in, you’ll get yours soon in the coming weeks!

Introducing: The Design Engineering Club Newsletter ✉️

We're also kicking off the Design Engineering Club Newsletter, a new series spotlighting design engineers in the wild - how they got here, what they're building, and the tools and philosophies that guide their work.

We aim to create a shared space where design engineers can share their experiences, write technical tutorials, and share perspectives to help foster knowledge exchange and inspire the broader design engineering community.

✍️ Call for Submissions

We’re now accepting submissions for upcoming editions of the newsletter!

We're looking for contributions from folks across the community that help us learn, reflect, and grow as design engineers. Some ideas to get you started:

• Stories about how you got into design engineering and what your specific path was

• Technical tutorials of specific design engineering skills, libraries or tools you’ve used

• Opinions or essays on the evolving role of design engineering

• Lessons learned while being a design engineer

Throughout this content, we’ll explore creative technology, emerging practices and real-world challenges from existing design engineers. If you’re designing an interface and working on hard engineering problems, this is for you.

Submit a proposal here ✨.

Events and opportunities from the community 🫶

Events

• Flo, Anna, and Mathu are organizing a rapid-fire ppt night for design engineers to share how they got into their roles and the types of problems they explore during their day to day this Wednesday evening at 8pm. RSVP here.

• BCV and Proof of Concept are organizing an Angel Investors for designers event where they’ll be bringing together active investors and curious design investors to talk about the intersection of design and investing this Thursday evening at 6:30pm. RSVP here.

  

• Women who Lift SF and Flint AI are organizing a lift and brunch for women engineers in SF Sunday June 15th. Would love to have our women design engineering gals join for this. RSVP here.

Opportunities

• Paradigm is hiring for design engineers in person in SF who are excited to reimagine UX for an AI native workspace

• Paper.design is hiring for a staff-level design engineer to help shape the future of design

• 222.place is hiring for a design engineer in NYC to help build the future of social

• Kaleido SF is organizing their second art and fashion show fundraiser in October and accepting submissions until June 22nd. Calling all artists and designers from fashion to poetry to explore the theme of “LIVE SPACES”: the vital environments shaping our lives. Learn more here.

So stoked for all to come with this community and for you all to shape what it becomes!

Submit a proposal here for the newsletter.

Questions or want to get involved? Just hit reply :). Let us know if you want your events featured in the next newsletter.

- The Design Engineering Community Team

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