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Design Engineer

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This is a fully remote role, but you’ll need to be based in Europe.

What we’re building at Xata:

We're building a database platform for companies that rely on PostgreSQL at scale. And by “at scale,” we don’t just mean large volumes of data or high server counts, we also mean growing teams and the operational complexity that comes with them: staging and developer branches with data, data anonymization and privacy, zero-downtime schema changes, and more.

In every feature we build, we optimise for developer experience, high performance, and flexibility. This gives our customers the confidence to rely on us for one of the most critical pieces of their cloud infrastructure.

The AI wave of developer tools presents exciting opportunities and challenges - and PostgreSQL and Xata are well-positioned to be at the center of it. We’re a transparent company, maintaining several popular open-source projects, and we enjoy writing technical blog posts about how we solve various challenges.

What you’ll be doing:

You’ll be joining our Product team as a design engineer, working closely with the frontend engineering team. You’ll be responsible for the overall product UX, DX, and visual design. This includes defining design guidelines, creating shared styles and components, and ensuring consistency across the product and public website.

At implementation time, you’ll contribute directly to the codebase or pair with frontend engineers. Our design process typically starts with simple wireframes and moves straight into coded prototypes (we usually skip high-fidelity mockups in Figma).We work with:

  • Next.js
  • Shadcn
  • Tailwind v4
  • React flow
  • Whimsical
  • Figma
  • v0

In this role, you will:

  • Be an active contributor to our core product and public website.
  • Collaborate in multifunctional project teams (with frontend engineers, marketing, and PMs) to create new features or improve existing ones - optionally leading such projects.

About you:

  • You have a sharp eye for aesthetics.
  • Experience with developer tools is a big plus.
  • You’re a self-starter who takes responsibility.
  • You’re comfortable working with design systems (preferably based on Shadcn and Tailwind).
  • You have at least a basic knowledge of React.
  • You’re open to leveraging AI tools like v0 to speed up development.
  • You have strong CSS skills.
  • You're comfortable working with Git and GitHub.

Nice to haves:

  • Solid engineering skills - coding expertise is a big plus. Familiarity with APIs, HTML, CSS, JavaScript (React), and accessibility (A11y) is a bonus.
  • Basic data visualisation skills (e.g. knowing what type of chart best represents data).
  • Any experience with databases (MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB) - maybe you've built something with one.
  • Experience working on open-source projects.
  • Interest in the startup world - you’re a shipper!
  • Basic illustration skills (we do everything in Figma - no Illustrator or complex vector tools).

Working at Xata:

  • We’re stable. We’ve raised $35M and have years of runway.
  • We're remote-first, with a team distributed around the world, mainly in Europe and on the East Coast of the USA.
  • Be part of a healthy culture, one that genuinely supports innovation, empowers individuals, and cares deeply about its people.
  • We work asynchronously. We don’t do agile. The team meets weekly to check in, and we use GitHub, Notion, and Slack to stay aligned.
  • You'll have autonomy to lead features and projects and bring your ideas to the table.
  • Our team is diverse. 
  • Xata is female-founded and the first developer platform with an all-female board of directors.
  • We encourage conference meet-ups.

What we offer all of our employees:

  • Competitive salary and stock options.
  • Friendly, diverse, and inclusive work environment.
  • 30 vacation days (not including local public holidays).
  • 2 months of fully paid parental leave.
  • Flexibility, autonomy, and real impact.
  • Budget for home office setup + coworking space stipend.
  • Continuous learning support - budget for conferences, courses, and books.
  • Healthcare coverage.
  • Two company offsites per year, with partners and kids welcome. So far, we’ve been to Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Iceland!
  • Ample opportunity for career growth - there are no boundaries to your development at Xata.

Our investors:

Xata is well-financed by amazing investors, including Guillermo Rauch (founder of Vercel), Shay Banon (co-founder and CEO of Elastic), Neha Narkhede (founder of Confluent), Elad Gil, Christian Bach, and Mathias Biilmann (founders of Netlify), and many others.

We’ve raised a $30 million Series A from top investors (Index Ventures and Redpoint), having the first ever 100% female board for such a technical company.

We care about diversity in tech:

If you come from an underrepresented background in tech, we strongly encourage you to apply. We believe that our success is driven by the talented and diverse team we’ve brought together from a variety of backgrounds, cultures, and countries. We’re always challenging ourselves to build an inclusive culture that enables us to create innovative and successful products.

Our founder, Monica Sarbu, also founded a non-profit organisation called Tupu, which helps tech companies support diversity in tech through mentorship.

We're eager to hear from you, and if you decide to apply, we're rooting for you!

How to apply

If this role sounds like a fit, we’d love to hear from you! When applying, please include a link to your personal website or portfolio, along with your GitHub profile. Or, anywhere else we can see examples of your work that blend design and code.  

🌍 This is a fully remote role, but you’ll need to be based in Europe.🌍 This is a fully remote role, but you’ll need to be based in Europe.