Design Engineer

About the Position

We are looking for a Design Engineer for AI Gateway to join our team at Vercel. This role involves owning product design and frontend implementation, working closely with customers and teams to shape developer products.

About Vercel

Vercel is the agentic infrastructure company, freeing people and agents to ship what's next. For more than a decade, we've helped builders move from idea to production with speed, security, and exceptional developer experience. Our products are trusted by companies like OpenAI, PayPal, Ramp, Supreme, and millions of developers worldwide.

About the Role

AI Gateway provides developers with a unified place to connect applications and agents to hundreds of models using a single API key. It handles provider routing and fallbacks, unifies billing and observability, and allows teams to 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.

As the Design Engineer for AI Gateway, you will own product design and frontend implementation across these 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Nice to Have

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

We Offer

• 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.

Disclosures

• Privacy: Please review our Job Applicant Privacy Policy for more information on how we handle your data.
• Equal Opportunity: Vercel is committed to fostering and empowering an inclusive community within our organization. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Vercel encourages everyone to apply for our available positions, even if they don't necessarily check every box on the job description.