Design Engineer

About Authorium

Authorium is transforming how government agencies manage complex, document-centric workflows. Our platform integrates essential administrative functions from procurement to contracting to budgeting and into a unified system that drives efficiency, compliance, and visibility for public-sector teams. We're approaching Series B.

We're also investing in AI capabilities - both internally and externally - building workflows trained specifically for government operations, and building an AI-first operational culture internally to accelerate our work and go further. AI isn't a side project here - it's reshaping both what we build and how we build it.

What a Design Engineer is at Authorium

A Design Engineer at Authorium designs and ships. You take an idea from a rough concept to a polished, production interface running in front of real government users, and you work highly independently through that process with a clear feedback loop.

You'll lean heavily on AI-native tooling to compress that loop. We expect you to be genuinely fluent in Claude Design and comparable AI design/build tools by using them to go from prompt to prototype to shippable component. The candidates we're most excited about treat AI as a force multiplier on craft, not a replacement for it.

Why This Role Exists

Government workflows are complex by nature. Our users manage procurement solicitations, evaluation scoring, contract documents, and compliance reporting and often for the first time on a digital platform. Making dense, high-stakes workflows feel navigable for people who didn't choose the tool and can't easily change their process is our baseline challenge - and an Authorium Design Engineer relishes that challenge and has a desire to live on both the design and engineering side of delivery.

What You'll Do

Design and build, end to end

• Take features from concept through interaction design, prototyping, and production front-end implementation. You write the code that ships, not just the spec for it.

• Build and maintain real interfaces in our codebase (Hotwire / Next.js), partnering with Engineering on architecture, state, and performance.

• Use Claude Design and other AI tooling to move fast: rapid prototypes, multiple directions, working components and bring strong judgment about which output is actually good.

Shape the product surface

• Improve UX across the platform from intake, approvals, document generation, evaluations, configuration, and reporting including fixing inconsistencies and usability gaps as you go.

• Contribute to the design system: components, patterns, and libraries that keep the product coherent and speed up everyone's delivery. You'll both use it and extend it in code.

• Help shape how AI shows up in the product with making AuthorAI feel context-aware and trustworthy for users across every level of AI comfort.

Ship with quality

• Design and build for accessibility and compliance from the start (WCAG 2.1 AA) — our government customers require it.

• Review your work against design intent through delivery and hold the bar on fidelity and polish.

• Work in sprints; manage your work in Jira and participate in planning and grooming.

Collaborate

• Partner with PMs to frame problems and make scope tradeoffs, and with Engineering on feasibility and front-end quality.

• Talk to users: lightweight usability checks, observing real workflows, and turning what you learn into better interfaces.

What We're Looking For

Required

• 2–3 years building digital products where you both designed and implemented the front end portfolios that show shipped work, not just mockups.

• Strong front-end engineering: Next.js, modern CSS, and comfort working in a real production codebase.

• Strong design craft: interaction design, layout, and a sharp eye for detail in dense, data-heavy interfaces with tables, filters, multi-step flows, role-based views.

• Demonstrated fluency with Claude Design (and/or comparable AI design/build tools) used as a serious part of how you ship and please show us examples.

• Proficiency in Figma (components, libraries, auto-layout, prototyping).

• Comfort with ambiguity and a bias toward shipping and you make judgment calls with incomplete information and move between design and code in the same day.

• Understanding of accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1 AA).

• Clear communication as you can explain a decision in terms of user outcomes and tradeoffs, not just aesthetics.

Nice to Have

• Experience with dense, workflow-driven enterprise / B2B products.

• Exposure to government, public sector, or other regulated/compliance-driven environments.

• Experience with product analytics tools (Pendo, Mixpanel, Amplitude, or similar).

• Experience integrating AI features into a product UI.