The posting
THE OPPORTUNITY
We're looking for a Product Designer to shape Restate's core product experience.
This role covers both, the core Restate UI with the design system behind it and the visual work that makes durable execution understandable to developers.
You'll work directly with the engineers who build the product and with the wider founding team.
WHY RESTATE
Durable runtimes are becoming the next foundational infrastructure layer, especially for AI. Restate’s vision is to make durable execution efficient and lightweight to run.
Restate is built by a team of world-class engineers - the creators of Apache Flink, leaders from Meta's messaging infrastructure, and senior engineers from AWS and Confluent.
AI-native companies like Replit as well as Fortune 500 enterprises rely on Restate in production for their core applications.
With a fresh $20M Series A fundraise by top tier investors and strong traction, we’re just getting started and are looking for people who share our vision and work ethos.
WHAT YOU’LL DO
On the core product:
- Design the core Restate UI: from whiteboarding sessions with engineers to shipping. You won't be writing the production code, but you stay with it until it's right.
- Make dense information readable: execution timelines, retries, queues, state, failures. Our users are engineers working out what happened, usually in a hurry, and deciding what they see first is most of the work.
- Keep one mental model: developers meet the same concepts in the UI, the SDKs and the docs. They should be named and presented the same way wherever someone runs into them.
- Bring durable execution to life visually: the current Restate product is loved for its simplicity in breaking down a technically complex product. You'll make sure we keep shipping at the same design bar.
Around the product:
- Explain Restate's architecture visually: interactive and animated explanations that make the key differentiators clear.
- Motion as a first-class medium: Restate is a living, durable system, and we want to design with motion to convey that.
- Ship across surfaces: developer-facing content, blog illustrations, social visuals, and more.
- Keep it coherent with the product: the visual language that explains Restate from the outside and the one inside the product should be the same language.
Across both:
- Build scalable design systems: reusable components and patterns for architecture diagrams, code visualizations, and interactive elements that others can benefit from.
- Work closely with design and engineering: skip the traditional handoff and iterate together, from first sketch through to shipped.
WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR
The profile
We're looking for a product designer with strong opinions and a portfolio that backs them up, covering both halves: complex product work you've designed, and visual work that explains something technical. You should be comfortable operating with significant autonomy, working directly with the founding team, and pushing back when the team is wrong.
You don't have to write production code. You do have to understand what you're designing for well enough to have the argument with an engineer and sometimes win it.
Must-haves:
- Product design depth on complex software. Several years designing tools, dashboards, or platforms. Not only marketing sites and consumer apps.
- Information design. Turning a lot of data into something a person can read quickly. Hierarchy, density, progressive disclosure, and knowing what to leave out.
- Visual storytelling for technical concepts. Show us how you've made something complex feel obvious.
- Brand and campaign craft. Layout, typography, illustration, launch visuals. Work that stands up next to the best in developer tools.
- Motion design ability. Motion as a way to communicate state, time, and dynamism.
- Design systems. Reusable components and patterns others can build on, and the discipline to keep them coherent over time.
- Strong design sensibility. A high visual bar you can hold across the product and the work that explains it, without waiting for someone to set the direction first. We're not precious about which tools you get there with.
- Technical curiosity. You don't need a distributed systems background, but you should be able to follow what the product does and design from understanding rather than from a screenshot.
- Writing. Labels, empty states, error messages, headlines.
- AI literacy. You're using AI to multiply your own impact and to unblock yourself.
Nice-to-haves:
- Prior work on a developer tools, infrastructure, or AI product. Familiarity with the developer audience and what "great" looks like in this space.
- Experience building or contributing to a design system in production.
- Prototyping in code, or enough HTML and CSS to communicate an idea precisely.
Not a fit:
- You've only designed complex software, or only made things look good from the outside. We need both.
- You expect a finished brief, or heavy direction. We need someone who arrives with a point of view and designs.
- You want to lead a design team rather than be the senior IC doing the work yourself.
- You're not interested in technical subject matter. Our surface area is wide, and the role lives or dies on translating it.
ENGAGEMENT, LOCATION, AND TRAVEL
- Location: remote in Europe preferred; US remote for exceptional candidates
- Travel: minimal; occasional team offsites.
