Design Engineer
Design Engineer
Full time, Sydney. (Aus HQ, global product)
Team: Early team, working directly with founders, engineers, and our designer
Why this role matters
As our design engineer, you'll close the gap between design and engineering, turning product vision into polished, shipped experiences. You'll set the standards for how we build interfaces in code, and shape the agentic coding processes that let a small team move at uncommon speed without losing craft.
Spike: We're not just looking for a front-end engineer who can ship pixels, or a designer who dabbles in code. We need a hybrid who spikes in three rare directions at once: front-end (sometimes full-stack) execution, deep user research and feedback loops, and a relentless sense of taste that turns design vision into reality. The kind of person who can talk to a parent in the morning, prototype the fix by lunch, and ship a design-system primitive that night.
This is a founding role. In addition to salary, we offer meaningful equity to reflect the ownership and long-term impact of this position. You will work closely in a team with 5 other stars (including the CTO + CEO), joining a founding team who have successfully raised, built and scaled tech from SafetyCulture, Aus, to LVL (Health-tech), Dubai. With the speed of build, funding and execution we have already created at indi we're on track to be the category leader in Australia, taking that impact globally and your work will scale us there.
About indi
indi is the shared AI assistant for child development - built to support the parents, carers, and clinicians navigating complex health journeys with kids who don't fit the mould.
We take messy, unstructured real-life data and turn it into a structured, living record of a child - one that can be visualised, shared, and actioned by everyone in their world. From that single source of truth, indi generates custom artefacts and communication tools tailored to each part of the care team: educators, therapists, doctors, support workers. This unlocks clarity, coordination, and earlier intervention.
At the same time, we're building indi as a true assistant for parents - helping reduce the mental load, support emotional wellbeing, and remind them they're not in this alone.
We're a lean, fast-moving team based in Melbourne & Sydney, building hand-in-hand with the families and clinicians we serve. Our culture is high-trust, low-ego, and unapologetically mission-led. We hire people who care - about impact, pace, and doing their best work in an environment that values initiative, inclusion, and humanity.
We're not building a typical startup team. We're building one that feels like indi: diverse, kind, emotionally intelligent, and bold enough to redesign the system, not just digitise it.
We're looking for a design engineer who lives at the seam between design and engineering. You might call yourself a front-end engineer with a design itch, a designer who codes, or a UX engineer. What matters is you own the experience end-to-end, and you have strong opinions on how it should feel.
What you'll do
- Be the cornerstone of our design system in code, setting the standards for how we build interfaces: components, primitives, motion, accessibility, and the conventions that keep things coherent as the team scales.
- Bring product and design vision to life: prototyping, iterating, and shipping polished front-end work across web (Next.js) and mobile (React Native), dabbling fullstack when a feature needs it.
- Lead user research and feedback loops: talking to parents and clinicians, watching real sessions, and turning what you learn into shipped product changes within the same week.
- Drive data-informed decisions: set up and interpret product analytics, run experiments, and use quantitative + qualitative signals to decide what to build next, not just how it looks.
- Shape how we build with agentic coding processes: codifying the prompts, skills, evals, and review loops that let agents safely write production-quality UI alongside humans.
- Own the marketing site and product marketing: ship landing pages, iterate on copy and visuals, and translate product features into stories that resonate with parents and clinicians.
- Partner deeply with our designer and engineers to co-create AI-native interactions that feel calm, clear, and trustworthy under emotional, high-stakes conditions.
- Set the bar for craft: typography, motion, density, empty states, error states, edge cases. The details that separate trustworthy from generic.
Our stack includes
- React/Next.js, React Native, TypeScript, Tailwind, shadcn
- Python, Supabase, Postgres
- Cloud infra (Fly.io, Docker)
- AI tooling (Pydantic, Anthropic, custom evals)
- Agentic dev: Claude Code, custom skills, evals, and review loops
You may be a good fit if you:
- Have shipped polished, production-grade front-end work you're proud to point at, preferably for products real people use under stress.
- Can author and evolve a design system in code, not just consume one.
- Have a habit of sitting with users (formally or informally) and letting what you hear change the product within days, not quarters.
- Are fluent enough across the stack to chase a bug or feature out of the front end and into the API or DB when it matters.
- Have a strong personal workflow with AI-assisted development. You don't just use agents, you tune them.
- Care about the societal impacts and ethics of your work.
- Show, don't tell: if you've shipped something where the craft is obvious, we'll give you space in the interview to walk us through it.
Strong candidates may also have experience with:
- Designing and engineering for health, education, or family-focused products, or adjacent industries where trust and clarity matter (fintech, mental health, gov services).
- Building or contributing to a design system from scratch in an early-stage startup.
- Conversational, chat-based, or AI-driven interfaces, and a sense of how to make them feel human.
- Accessibility and inclusive design in sensitive contexts.
- Shaping the dev tooling, prompts, and evals that let a small team punch above its weight with agents.
Diversity + inclusion
Voluntary Self-Identification
At indi, we're building a team that reflects the families we serve: diverse in background, identity, and lived experience. Part of that commitment means making sure our hiring process is fair and inclusive.
✨ Our promise: indi is unapologetically mission-led. We believe the same diversity that makes every child unique is what makes our team stronger. Sharing your identity is always your choice.
This is a full-time role, but if 3 or 4 days a week works better for your life, we're open to that.
We care more about finding the right person than strict hours, and we know some of the best talent doesn't always fit a full-time mould. If that's you, apply anyway, we'd love to chat.
We're looking for an amazing Design Engineer and never want work life balance to be a barrier. If you're an amazing design engineer and need flexibility we're still open to chat. We're built by parents that get it.