Design Engineer

About Purelend

Purelend is an early-stage company operating at the frontier of FinTech and AI. Our small, tight-knit founding team is reimagining banking technology, starting with mortgage loans. We're fully automating the manual checks and underwriting which historically have meant hours or days of frustrating manual work. Our customers and their clients get what they want faster: a funded mortgage.

Our customers are mortgage brokers, underwriters, and lenders. They stare at our product for hours every day, on real files with real money attached. Every screen we ship either makes their job feel obvious or it makes it feel painful. There isn't much middle ground.

Our AI Stance

We're all in on AI, and not just in the product. Engineering, infrastructure, design, customer support, sales: every function here uses the best AI tooling we can find to maximize quality and throughput on a small team. We're looking for someone who wants to help us push that bet further inside design and front-end work too, not someone who's skeptical of it.

The Role

We're hiring a Design Engineer to own the product experience end-to-end: how it works, how it looks, and the code that actually ships it. This is one role, not three handoffs. You'll talk to customers, decide what we should build, design it, and then write the React, Tailwind, and TypeScript that puts it in front of users.

We don't want a designer who hands off Figma files. We don't want a frontend engineer who waits for specs. We want someone who lives in the middle and is great at all three corners of it.

What You'll Actually Do

Sit With Customers

You'll watch brokers and underwriters use the product on their own files. Not in a research lab, on their actual screens with their actual deals open. That's how you'll know whether a column needs to be wider, whether a status chip is the wrong color, or whether the whole flow needs to be rebuilt because nobody's using it the way you expected.

Decide What to Build

You'll work with the founders and the rest of the team on product priorities, and you'll have a real seat at that table. You should be the person in the room who says “before we build this, let me prototype three versions in a day and put them in front of a broker.”

Design It

Sometimes that's in Figma. Sometimes it's skipping Figma entirely and designing directly in the codebase because that's faster. You have strong taste on type, spacing, hierarchy, motion, color. You know the difference between a UI that looks pretty in a marketing shot and a UI that's genuinely good to live in for eight hours a day. Most of what we build is the second kind.

Ship It

You'll write the React, Tailwind, and TypeScript yourself. Next.js, server actions, the component library, the animation, the empty states, the keyboard handlers, the accessibility, the loading skeletons. You'll review the engineers' UI code and they'll review yours. The bar is “feels like a product made by people who care.”

Own the Design System

You'll build and maintain the components, tokens, and patterns that the rest of the team builds on. When something's inconsistent across the product, you'll be the person who notices and the person who fixes it. The system should make it hard for the team to ship something ugly.

Prototype Aggressively

A working prototype in front of a real customer beats a week of internal debate. You should be comfortable spinning up a flow over a weekend, putting it on a real broker's screen, and either killing it on Monday or turning it into the next feature.

What You Bring

• 4–8 years of experience at the intersection of design and engineering. We're open on the title you've held before (design engineer, product engineer, full-stack designer, lead product designer who codes), but the shape of the work has to match what's above.
• You write production React. Not prototype-only. You've shipped real features that real users depend on. Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind are second nature, or you can credibly say you'll be productive in them inside two weeks.
• A portfolio of work you can talk through in detail. Not screenshots. The reasoning. Why this layout, why this density, why this interaction instead of the more obvious one, what you learned when customers used it.
• Taste. This is the hardest one to describe and the easiest one to assess. Your work should make us want to copy your approach to type, spacing, and hierarchy. You should look at most B2B SaaS and have an opinion about what it gets wrong.
• Interaction design instincts. Motion, feedback, keyboard support, focus management, accessibility: you treat these as part of the design, not an afterthought engineers worry about.
• Comfort with data-dense UI. Our customers live in tables, file viewers, document overlays, status pipelines. We're not designing landing pages. We're designing the flight deck a broker uses to fly a deal.
• Direct customer engagement. You're comfortable getting on a call with a broker or underwriter and asking the questions that change what we ship next.
• You can hold your own with engineers. You can read the code that already exists, push back when an engineer says “that's not possible,” and make tradeoffs that respect both the design and the system underneath it.
• An AI-first mindset for your own work. You use the best AI tooling available to compound your output: v0 / generative UI for first drafts, coding agents inside the editor, model-assisted prototyping. You treat AI as part of the craft, not a threat to it.

What We're Not Looking For

• Pure designers who'd need an engineer to translate everything they make.
• Pure engineers who can build a beautiful Linear clone but freeze when they have to design something from scratch.
• Anyone who treats design as decoration rather than how the product actually works.
• Folks looking for a role where the design system, the research function, and the PM are already in place. You're building those.

Why This Role Is Interesting

Most fintech is ugly and frustrating to use because the companies building it haven't put a design engineer anywhere near the product. We have a chance to do the opposite at the moment when we're defining how the entire product feels. You'll set the bar for how every screen in Purelend looks, behaves, and ships for the next several years.

Compensation

Our total compensation, a blend of cash and equity, is market competitive.

Details

• Location: Calgary, AB — in-office
• Reports to: Seb Hiscock (CTO)