Design Engineer

About the Role:

AI Gateway gives developers one place to connect applications and agents to hundreds of models with one API key. It handles provider routing and fallbacks, unifies billing and observability, and lets teams manage spend and security controls across production AI workloads.

Designing this well is a systems problem. A developer should be able to choose the right model, make and verify a first request, diagnose a failed request, and configure routing, budgets, credentials, and security controls without losing sight of the application they are trying to build. The right interface might be in the dashboard, on the public model catalog, in the CLI, in an API response, or in code.

You will be the Design Engineer for AI Gateway, owning product design and frontend implementation across those surfaces. You will work with customers, a Product Manager, and engineers to understand the problem, explore solutions, build the production experience, ship it, and learn from what happens after launch.

AI Gateway is live, the model ecosystem changes every week, and the team can move from an observed problem to production quickly. This is a rare chance to use your product judgment, design craft, and code to shape a developer product and ship the experience yourself.

You will be the design owner embedded with a Product Manager and a dedicated engineering team. You will also have the Product Design team around you for critique, collaboration, and support. AI Gateway will be your main product area, with room to pursue design-led improvements across Vercel. You will report to the Design Team.

If you’re based within a pre-determined commuting distance of one of our offices (SF, NY, London, or Berlin), the role includes in-office anchor days on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday. If you're located beyond that distance, the role is fully remote. For location-specific details, please connect with our recruiting team.

What You Will Do:

• Own product design and frontend implementation for meaningful parts of the journey from discovering a model to making a first successful request and operating AI in production.
• Design and build production experiences across the website, dashboard, CLI, and APIs, choosing the right medium for each problem.
• Make models, providers, credentials, routing, budgets, logs, performance, privacy, and governance understandable, then create patterns that extend across new providers, modalities, and workloads.
• Talk directly with customers and use product data to understand problems, define success, make tradeoffs, and improve what ships.
• Own quality after launch, including visual and interaction craft, accessibility, performance, resilience, instrumentation, and edge cases.
• Use coding agents to explore and implement ideas quickly, while testing, debugging, and taking responsibility for what ships.

About You:

• Your work shows what you personally identified, designed, built, shipped, and learned after launch.
• You build production-quality web applications with React and TypeScript and can contribute confidently in a large, existing codebase.
• You bring strong visual and interaction craft and have made technical or data-rich products understandable without removing the control advanced users need.
• You can move between graphical interfaces, CLI workflows, API behavior, and implementation details, treating accessibility, performance, failure recovery, and instrumentation as part of the design.
• You use customer research and product data to make decisions, communicate your reasoning clearly, challenge ideas constructively, and change direction when the evidence changes.
• You use coding agents in your daily work, but you can explain, test, debug, and take responsibility for the code they help produce.

There is no required path into this role. You may come from product design, frontend engineering, creative development, or a career that does not fit a standard title. We care about the quality of what you have shipped and the judgment behind it.

Bonus If You:

• Have experience with developer tools, infrastructure products, model marketplaces, or observability experiences.
• Have worked with AI models, providers, inference platforms, guardrails, or AI application tooling.
• Have experience with APIs, command-line tools, structured product content, or agent-facing interfaces.
• Have built an application or agent with Vercel’s AI SDK or AI Gateway.

See the work:

• AI Gateway
• AI Gateway documentation
• Browse AI models
• AI model leaderboards
• Design Engineering at Vercel

Compensation & Benefits:

• Competitive compensation package, including equity.
• Inclusive Healthcare Package.
• Learn and Grow - we provide mentorship and send you to events that help you build your network and skills.
• Flexible Time Off.
• We will provide you the gear you need to do your role, and a WFH budget for you to outfit your space as needed.

The San Francisco, CA base pay range for this role is $208,000 - $312,000. Actual salary will be based on job-related skills, experience, and location. Compensation outside of San Francisco may be adjusted based on employee location. The total compensation package may include benefits, equity-based compensation, and eligibility for a company bonus or variable pay program depending on the role. Your recruiter can share more details during the hiring process.