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Restate is a lightweight runtime that makes AI agents, workflows, and backend services durable and reliable. The company is building foundational infrastructure for the next generation of production systems, already used by Fortune 500 companies and cutting-edge AI startups.
As Product Designer, you'll shape Restate's core product experience across two interconnected areas:
**Core Product Work:**
Design the Restate UI and its underlying design system. You'll work from whiteboarding sessions with engineers through to shipping, focusing on making dense technical information (execution timelines, retries, queues, state, failures) readable and actionable for engineers troubleshooting in production. You'll ensure consistent mental models across the UI, SDKs, and documentation, maintaining the product's reputation for clarity in a technically complex domain.
**Visual & Explanatory Work:**
Create visual explanations of Restate's architecture through interactive and animated content. You'll design motion as a first-class medium to convey the living, durable nature of the system. Work spans developer-facing content, blog illustrations, social visuals, and more—all coherent with the product's visual language.
**Cross-Functional Responsibilities:**
Build scalable design systems with reusable components for architecture diagrams, code visualizations, and interactive elements. Work closely with engineers and the founding team, skipping traditional handoffs to iterate from sketch through shipping. You'll operate with significant autonomy and push back when needed.
You'll partner with world-class engineers, including creators of Apache Flink and leaders from Meta's infrastructure teams, on problems where reliability and operational simplicity are existential.
**Requirements:**
Must have: Several years of product design experience on complex software (tools, dashboards, platforms—not just marketing sites or consumer apps). Demonstrated expertise in information design (hierarchy, density, progressive disclosure). Portfolio showing visual storytelling for technical concepts. Brand and campaign craft skills (layout, typography, illustration, launch visuals). Motion design ability to communicate state and dynamism. Design systems experience with reusable components and coherence discipline. Strong independent visual sensibility and high design bar. Technical curiosity to understand distributed systems concepts without formal background. Writing ability for labels, empty states, error messages, headlines. AI literacy to multiply impact and unblock yourself.
Nice-to-have: Prior work on developer tools, infrastructure, or AI products. Production design system experience. Prototyping in code or HTML/CSS proficiency. Not a fit: Designers who've only done complex software OR only visual work (role requires both). Those expecting finished briefs or heavy direction. Candidates seeking to lead a design team rather than do senior IC work. Those uninterested in technical subject matter.
