Design Engineer

About this role

Cradle seeks a Design Engineer in Zürich to help build an AI-powered protein design platform used by scientists globally. You'll bridge UX design, visual design, and frontend engineering, creating intuitive interfaces for complex, data-dense biological workflows while maintaining high craft standards.

What you'll do

• Design and implement interfaces for experiment tracking, ML workflow configuration, and scientific result exploration
• Maintain and evolve the design system with attention to layout, motion, affordances, and visual polish
• Build interactive prototypes in TypeScript, React, and CSS to test interactions before production implementation
• Collaborate with UX researchers, designers, and engineers to translate complex biological workflows into understandable interfaces
• Own features end-to-end from ambiguous problem definition through shipping and iteration
• Ensure visual excellence and attention to detail across states, transitions, and edge cases

What they're looking for

• Product design and visual design with shipped portfolio examples
• TypeScript, React, CSS, and modern frontend architecture
• Design systems creation and maintenance
• UX prototyping and user testing
• Strong communication across cross-functional teams
• Attention to motion, hierarchy, and information density
• AI-native development tools (Claude, Cursor)

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Generous equity stake
• Wide range of benefits
• Career progression opportunities
• Multi-year funding runway providing stability
• Distributed team across Zürich and Amsterdam with strong culture focus