Senior Design Engineer, AI Platforms

chess; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Chess.com seeks a design engineer to own the interfaces across Engage-o-tron, GNS, and internal admin tools. The role is dense, technical, and high-leverage, requiring strong design taste and coding in production frontends with AI-native editors.

You will design and implement end-to-end frontend features, collaborate with engineers and stakeholders, and contribute to the design system. The position is 100% remote and open to candidates with at least 3 hours overlap with Eastern Time Zone.

Qualifications

• Hands-on prompting and AI-native development tool usage in daily workflow.
• Polished taste in typography, spacing, and information density.
• Strong web skills with TypeScript, Vue, React, and design system ownership.

Responsibilities

• Design compelling, clear UI/UX and produce high-quality mocks with strong product taste.
• Turn mocks into pixel-perfect, production-ready frontends using modern web tech.
• Iterate on interfaces by improving layout, motion and design consistency.
• Collaborate with engineers, partners, and stakeholders to design and implement features end-to-end.
• Rapidly prototype and vibe code to explore ideas and gather feedback.
• Contribute to design systems, components libraries and patterns to raise frontend quality.
• Own and evolve the design system: components, tokens, patterns for fast shipping.
• Prototype ideas and ship production polish end to end.

Skills

AI-native tools

Web technologies: TS

V u e / React expertise

Design system in code

Open source UI

Team collaboration

Ownership mindset

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Figma

Job description

About Us

Chess.com is one of the largest gaming sites in the world and the #1 platform for playing, learning, and enjoying chess.

We are a team of 600+ fully remote people in 60+ countries working hard to serve the global chess community. We are here to support 250M+ chess players worldwide with the best possible product, content, and tools to serve the community!

We are a tech company. A gaming company. A content company. And we do it all with passion and commitment to the game. Above all we prize our mission-driven, flat, life-celebrating, no-corporate culture, and we look forward to meeting you and learning more about what you can bring to the team.

About the Role

We are looking for a design engineer to own the interfaces of the platforms Chess.com runs on: Engage-o-tron, our growth platform; GNS, our AI-native knowledge and agent platform; and the internal admin tools our teams live in every day.

These are internal products, and that's the appeal. Your users are experts, they use these tools all day, and what they build in them reaches 250M+ players. The work is dense, technical, and high-leverage.

You’ll decide how something should look, feel, and work, then ship it yourself. No handoff, no spec thrown over a wall.

Two kinds of people fit this role. The full-stack designer who's dreamed something up, designed it, built it, and launched it end to end. Or the strong front-end engineer with real design taste, someone who codes for a living but has defensible opinions about type, layout, motion, and information density. We care about the combination, not which side you started on.

About You

You have an eye, you can't unsee bad spacing or a muddled information hierarchy, and you take pride in writing high-quality, high-performance code. You're AI-first by conviction, not by mandate: you already build with AI-native editors and you see them as an amplifier of solid skills, not a threat to them. You're energized rather than bored by enterprise, technical, developer-facing product, because making the complicated feel simple is the whole job. And you want the range and ownership that only exist when one person owns the whole front-end.

What you'll do

• Design compelling, clear UI/UX and produce high-quality mocks that demonstrate strong product taste.
• Turn design mocks (yours or others’) into pixel-perfect, production-ready frontends using modern web tech.
• Iterate on existing interfaces by improving layout, interaction quality, motion, and design consistency.
• Work closely with engineers, partners, and stakeholders. You’ll support the design and implementation of features end-to-end.
• Rapidly prototype and "vibe code" to explore ideas, gather feedback, and iterate quickly.
• Contribute to design systems, component libraries, and patterns that raise the bar for frontend quality
• You will own and evolve the design system: the components, tokens, and patterns that let everyone ship UI fast
• You will use Cursor and Claude to build technologies that are AI‑first
• You will prototype your own ideas and ship production polish end to end
• You will design the interface layer for AI-native workflows: streaming, long-running agent runs, tool‑calling surfaces
• You will code! A lot!
• You will do code reviews

Required Skills

• Hands‑on experience fluency prompting and building AI-native development tools like (Claude Code, Cursor) as part of their daily workflow—and genuinely excited to use them to move fast on early ideas (this is core to how this team works)
• Cares deeply about polish. Defensible, articulate taste in typography, spacing, layout, micro-interactions, transitions, and information density.
• Strong practical skills in modern web technologies (TypeScript, Vue, React or equivalent), with real experience building and owning a design system in code.
• Contributed to open source UI libraries or design resources.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills working in a fully distributed team
• Sense of ownership and responsibility

Preferred Skills

• Strong UX and visual design skills with proven taste and craftsmanship.
• Ability to move fluidly between design tools (Figma, etc.) and frontend code.
• Background in internal tools, admin dashboards, or developer‑facing products.
• Fluency prompting and building with AI-native code editors (Claude Code, Cursor) as part of your daily workflow
• Instincts for prompt engineering and LLM integration, and for how model behavior (latency, streaming, uncertainty, failure modes) should surface in the UI
• Experience building AI-native interface patterns: streaming output, agentic or long-running tasks, or tool‑calling surfaces
• Comfort designing or consuming APIs that serve front-end applications, clean contracts, performance, reliability at the boundary
• Strong collaboration and communication skills working in a fully distributed team
• Sense of ownership and responsibility

About the Opportunity

• This is a full-time opportunity
• We are 100% remote (work from anywhere!)
• This role is open to candidates who can work with at least 3 hours' overlap with Eastern Time Zone

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You can learn more about us here:

• https://www.chess.com/everyone
• https://www.chess.com/jobs#values