Senior AI Design Engineer

Deel; España; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock grant opportunities

Flexible office membership

Visibility into career growth and new-

Job summary

Deel is seeking a senior individual contributor who blends design craft with frontend engineering to build an AI-driven design system and production interfaces. You will design the substrate, define workflows, and work hands-on in Figma and production code to prove the system works at scale.

You will collaborate with Engineering, Product, and design-system teams to maintain high standards, push generative UI capabilities, and craft reusable playbooks for the wider design org across a global SaaS

Qualifications

• Real taste for layout, typography, interaction, motion with polish
• Ability to design interfaces and prototype in production code quickly
• Experience designing systems and design tokens for AI-assisted workflows
• Senior level: 7+ years in product design and frontend engineering in complex products

Responsibilities

• Architect the design system, tokens, and components as the substrate AI generates against
• Stay hands-on by designing real interfaces and prototyping in production frontend code
• Define production-readiness criteria for AI-generated UI and establish fidelity benchmarks
• Drive the AI-native workflow across the design organization and maintain current standards
• Collaborate with Engineering, Product, and design-system contributors to ensure round-tripping to shared surfaces
• Prototype and evaluate AI-generated interfaces as a product capability and roadmap item
• Create playbooks and prompts to enable the wider design org to reuse the system

Skills

Design

Code & prototype

Systems thinking

AI-native tooling

Senior designer + frontend

Tools

TypeScript/React

Figma

HTML/CSS

Job description

Who We Are Is What We Do. Deel is the all-in-one payroll and HR platform for global teams. Our vision is to unlock global opportunity for every person, team, and business. Built for the way the world works today, Deel combines HRIS, payroll, compliance, benefits, performance, and equipment management into one seamless platform. With AI-powered tools and a fully owned payroll infrastructure, Deel supports every worker type in 150+ countries—helping businesses scale smarter, faster, and more compliantly.

Who We Are Is What We Do. Deel is the all-in-one payroll and HR platform for global teams. Our vision is to unlock global opportunity for every person, team, and business. Built for the way the world works today, Deel combines HRIS, payroll, compliance, benefits, performance, and equipment management into one seamless platform. With AI-powered tools and a fully owned payroll infrastructure, Deel supports every worker type in 150+ countries—helping businesses scale smarter, faster, and more compliantly. Among the largest globally distributed companies in the world, our team of 7,000 spans more than 100 countries, speaks 74 languages, and brings a connected and dynamic culture that drives continuous learning and innovation for our customers.

Why should you be part of our success story? As the fastest-growing Software as a Service (SaaS) company in history, Deel is transforming how global talent connects with world-class companies – breaking down borders that have traditionally limited both hiring and career opportunities. We're not just building software; we're creating the infrastructure for the future of work, enabling a more diverse and inclusive global economy. In 2024 alone, we paid $11.2 billion to workers in nearly 100 currencies and provided healthcare and benefits to workers in 109 countries—ensuring people get paid and protected, no matter where they are.

Our momentum is reflected in our achievements and customer satisfaction: CNBC Disruptor 50, Forbes Cloud 100, Deloitte Fast 500, and repeated recognition on Y Combinator's top companies list – all while maintaining a 4.83 average rating from 15,000 reviews across G2, Trustpilot, Captera, Apple and Google.

Your experience at Deel will be a career accelerator. At the forefront of the global work revolution, you'll tackle complex challenges that impact millions of people's working lives. With our momentum—backed by a $17.3 billion valuation and $1 B in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in just over five years—you'll drive meaningful impact while building expertise that makes you a sought-after leader in the transformation of global work.

About The Role

Most teams use AI as a faster way for humans to build products. At Deel, we want to go further: build the system that lets AI build the products, with humans defining the taste, the guardrails, and the standards it works within.

That system is your product. You design and build the substrate AI generates against: the design system and component architecture, the generation and agent workflows, the quality gates that keep AI output production-ready, and the feedback loops that keep everything visible to the team. You stay hands-on as a designer throughout, because the fastest way to prove a generation system works is to design and ship real interfaces on top of it.

This is a senior individual contributor role. It is systems-first and craft-backed: you build the machine, and you use your own design ability to pressure-test it. You spend your time in Figma and in a code editor in roughly equal measure, you partner directly with design leadership to drive AI adoption across the whole design organisation, and you work as part of a cross-functional team alongside Engineering and Product rather than in isolation.

What You Will Do

• Build the system that lets AI build products - Architect the design system, tokens, and components as the substrate AI generates against. Design prompt libraries, patterns, and agent workflows that turn design intent into production-ready UI with minimal human assembly.
• Design hands-on to prove it - Stay a practicing designer. Explore concepts quickly, design real interfaces, and prototype in production front-end code so you are the first and toughest test of whether the system produces excellent, shippable work.
• Own quality, guardrails, and evals - Define production-readiness criteria for AI-generated UI, design-to-code fidelity benchmarks, regression safeguards, and evaluation methods that keep AI output honest. Acceleration cannot come at the cost of craft.
• Drive the AI workflow across the design org - Partner directly with design leadership to maintain, evolve, and roll out the AI-native workflow across the whole design organisation, not just your own work. This is a shared, ongoing responsibility, not a one-off setup: driving adoption, keeping standards current as tools change, and embedding the workflow across teams so it never depends on one person.
• Work cross-functionally - Collaborate closely with Engineering, Product, and design-system contributors. You complement engineering rather than replacing it, and you keep the system round-tripping to shared surfaces such as Figma so AI-accelerated output stays visible and open to feedback, never a black box.
• Push into generative UI - Take AI beyond the build process and into the product itself. Prototype and evaluate adaptive, AI-generated interfaces as a product capability, and help shape where they belong on the roadmap.
• Level up the team - Turn what works into playbooks, prompt libraries, and enablement so the wider design org builds on the system rather than relying on you. The goal is durable capability, not tool dependency.

What We Are Looking For

The heart of this role - You move fluidly between design and code. You don't need to be the deepest specialist in either discipline—what matters is you can design something well, build it yourself, and use AI to move quickly between the two.

• Design - Real taste for layout, typography, interaction, motion; you care about polish
• Code & prototype - Comfortable writing TypeScript/React (HTML, CSS, animation included). Prototype fast, moving between Figma and code to get from idea to working interface in hours rather than days
• Systems thinking - Built or extended design systems others rely on
• AI-native using AI design and coding tools in real work and keen to help shape new ones.
• Seniority - 7+ years in product design + front-end engineering in complex products; comfortable with ambiguity and setting standards others follow

Total Rewards

• Our salary range reflects gross base salary. For commercial roles with commission eligibility, this figure represents On-Target Earnings (OTE), inclusive of base salary and target commission.
• Salary ranges are quoted in USD as a consistent global reference. Your offer will be localized to your country's currency using a market-aligned conversion.
• Final pay is based on objective, job-related criteria including experience, skills, and location.
• We don't ask about salary history. Offers are based on the role and what you bring to it.

Some things you'll enjoy

• Stock grant opportunities dependent on your role, employment status and location
• Additional perks and benefits based on your employment status and country
• Optional flexible working office membership, with IWG

At Deel, we're an equal-opportunity employer that values diversity and positively encourage applications from suitably qualified and eligible candidates regardless of race, religion, sex, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, pregnancy or maternity or other applicable legally protected characteristics.

Unless otherwise agreed, we will communicate with job applicants using Deel-specific emails, which include @deel.com and other acquired company emails like @payspace.com and @paygroup.com. You can view the most up-to-date job listings at Deel by visiting our careers page.

Deel welcomes persons with disabilities to apply to any of our open roles. We will provide application and/or interview accommodations on request throughout the recruitment, selection and assessment process for applicants with disabilities or other needs. If you require application and/or interview accommodations, please inform our Talent Acquisition Team via email ([e-mail]) and a team member will be in touch to ensure your equal participation.

As part of our hiring process, we primarily rely on interviews and role-related assessments. In limited cases, we may also consider informal background information relevant to the role, in line with our privacy and fairness obligations.

This application process may utilise Automated Employment Decision Tools (AEDT) and AI systems to assist in evaluating candidates based on experience level, technical skills and qualifications. This processing is conducted in compliance with applicable Data Protection, AI Governance and Labour Laws. We ensure human oversight is maintained in all final hiring decisions. Your personal data is not used to train AI models. For more information on how we process your personal data, please see our Recruitment Privacy Policy.

• For NYC Residents: In accordance with NYC Local Law 144, an independent bias audit has been conducted on AEDT