Lead Design Engineer (m/f/d)

BlockBrain; Hamburg; On-site; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible on-site work: Stuttgart or HH

Deutschland‑Ticket

Wellpass fitness membership

Access to AI tools

Off-sites and team events

Job summary

Blockbrain is hiring a design leader who will shape both the design foundation and the team. You will lead design engineers across the full product, own the vision and standards, and still write code where it matters most.

Reporting to engineering leadership, you will drive professional and disciplinary responsibilities, with ownership from day one and a chance to influence how design and engineering work together as we scale.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in product design or frontend-focused roles with a strong portfolio.
• Leadership in design or design engineering teams, including hiring and setting direction.
• Craft-focused; high standard for interactions and design quality.
• System thinking: design cohesive systems across components, states, and edge cases.
• Able to read/write code; prefer production-ready designs over pretty-but-unusable UI.
• Data-driven decisions; good at shipping and iterating based on metrics.
• Fluent in English; German is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design engineering team with professional and disciplinary responsibility: hire, coach, and develop top performers.
• Own the design vision across web, agent UI, and mobile; set direction for the team.
• Define and evolve Blockbrain's component library, interaction patterns, spacing, typography, and motion.
• Stay hands-on and implement components in TypeScript/React to close the gap between design and production.
• Design interfaces for complex agent workflows, configuration surfaces, and human-in-the-loop moments.
• Establish design critique practices across the engineering organisation and raise the bar.
• Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to shape product direction as we scale.

Skills

8+ years design

Leadership experience

Craft excellence

System thinking

Technical fluency

Data-driven

English fluency

German optional

Tools

TypeScript/React

Job description

Blockbrain is growing fast, and design is becoming a core driver of how our product wins. As the team scales, we need someone who not only sets the craft bar but builds and leads the people who hold it. This is where design leadership meets hands‑on execution.

This is a rare opportunity to shape both the design foundation and the team that grows on it. You lead design engineers across the full product, own the vision and the standards, and still write code where it matters most. You report directly to the engineering leadership, carry real professional and disciplinary responsibility for your team, and shape how design and engineering work together at Blockbrain. Real ownership and room to build from day one.

What we expect

• 8+ years of experience in product design, design engineering, or frontend-heavy design roles, with a strong portfolio that proves your craft, ideally gained in fast-paced startups or scale-ups
• Proven leadership experiencewith professional and disciplinary responsibility for design or design engineering teams, from hiring and developing people to setting direction and holding the bar
• Craft obsessive: you care about the difference between a good interaction and a great one, and you know how to instill that standard in a whole team
• System‑thinker first: you design systems, not screens, so your work is coherent across components, states, edge cases, and error conditions
• Technically fluent: you read and write code, understand what is expensive to implement versus cheap, and never ship designs that are beautiful in Figma and painful in production
• Data-driven and decisive: you ground decisions in real behaviour and metrics, make the call under ambiguity, ship it, and revise when you learn something
• Fluent English, German is a plus

Expected AI Skills

AI is not a buzzword here, it is part of our daily work and a real multiplier.

• Use AI tools to generate design variations, explore interaction concepts, and accelerate visual production, and leverage coding agents to implement and iterate on frontend code without waiting on others
• Work directly with Blockbrain's own agent platform, stay current on how AI reshapes interface paradigms, and feed real design intuitions back into the product

We are not looking for AI experts, but for designers who treat AI as a creative and engineering multiplier, not a novelty.

Your mission

• Lead the design engineering team with professional and disciplinary responsibility: hire, develop, coach, and bring the right people to top performance
• Own the design vision across the full product, from web and agent UI to mobile, and set the direction the team builds on
• Define and evolveBlockbrain's component library, interaction patterns, spacing, typography, and motion, keeping it consistent across all surfaces
• Stay hands‑on: implement components directly in the TypeScript/React codebase and close the gap between design intent and production reality
• Design interfaces for complex agent workflows, configuration surfaces, and human‑in‑the‑loop moments, owning decisions from first sketch through shipped component
• Establish design critique practices across the engineering organisation, define what good looks like, and hold the bar
• Partner with Product and Engineering leadership as a peer, shaping product direction and how design and engineering work together as we scale

Why us?

• Flexible Work Models: Full-time position on‑site in Stuttgart or Hamburg (3 days per week) with flexible working hours.
• Benefits: Deutschland‑Ticket, Wellpass fitness membership, access to the latest AI tools, and regular company and team off‑sites.
• Top Team: International team with exceptional talents.
• High Growth Potential:Steep learning curve in a fast‑growing AI startup. A high level of personal responsibility and the freedom to actively shape processes.
• Top Equipment:MacBook, iPhone, headset, and all the tools you need to perform at your best.

About us

For mid‑sized and enterprise companies in DACH, knowledge is the last real competitive lever. Yet knowledge gets stuck in tools and SharePoint folders - or disappears when experts leave. While IT is still planning, employees are already using ChatGPT and the like - without governance, and sensitive data is leaking out.

With the Knowledge Bots platform, Blockbrain creates what companies truly need: AI‑powered knowledge management that is quick to implement, flexibly scales, and operates in a compliant manner. Teams use our GenAI building blocks to build tailored AI assistants, agents, and workflows in minutes - just like Lego.

Series A funded with strong growth momentum (10x product usage & 5x revenue in 2025)

Enterprise clients such as Roland Berger, Bosch, and Harting from industries including manufacturing, finance, and legal - sectors with the highest security requirements

ISO 27001 certified, EU AI Act ready. Made in Germany.