Senior Design Engineer (m/f/d)

Sharpist supports enterprises in scaling leadership development, making change stick, and driving business transformation. Key result: change accelerates from annual strategy meetings to daily implementation.

We are the digital platform for 1:1 and AI coaching powering leading global brands, such as IKEA, Porsche, and LVMH. Behind thousands of successful leaders and top talent stands a Sharpist coach.

What you'll do here at Sharpist

As a Senior Design Engineer (f/m/x), you will have a true impact in changing how companies transform mindsets and behavior across their entire workforce globally. You will play a key role in contributing to the design and delivery of our hybrid human + AI coaching experience, and you will primarily be responsible for designing and shipping high-quality product experiences, and enabling our Product Engineers to build them consistently and at pace. 

You do this by supporting our client companies to drive their  strategic initiatives and employee development initiatives by using Sharpist’s unique approach primed with digital coaching cemented by a strong learner experience fuelled by our Sharpist apps. This means you get to work with some of the most exciting brands in DACH and globally, including names such as IKEA, LVMH or GetYourGuide.

In your role you will design and ship solutions across our product — web and mobile learner app, coach and internal platforms, and enterprise client dashboard. You won't be boxed into one area: you work on whatever matters most in the moment, from the learner-facing moments people love to the workflows behind the scenes.

Operating in the overlap between design and code, you own the full cycle — framing the problem, shaping the solution, prototyping in code, and often shipping it to production yourself, working closely with the lead designer and product engineers.

A big part of this role is enablement. We already have a robust design system — components and patterns live in the codebase and Storybook — and a lead designer who owns the design vision. Your job is to close the gaps between design intent and what actually ships, and build the workflows and guardrails that let Product Engineers prototype and ship on-brand features without a designer in the loop for every change. Alongside the lead designer, you help raise the bar for the design quality of what engineering ships — through review, pairing, and shared standards.

You also surface problems worth solving (from research, design gaps, and other signals) for the team to consider. You bring a forward-looking, AI-native approach to how we discover, prototype, validate, and ship, and you don't compromise on excellent craft.

Within 1 month, you will…

• Get a complete understanding of our product surfaces beginning with learner mobile and web apps, and enterprise dashboard: who uses what, on which platform, and what success looks like

• Get familiar with our codebase and front-end stack, and ship your first small, polished changes to production

• Run a lightweight product + UX audit across the areas you touch, documenting gaps, friction points, and opportunities for improvement — including where our design language and components are inconsistent or missing

• Get to know how the product trio works — how we source problems, craft them, and run spikes — and start contributing your own observations

• Establish your AI-in-design-and-build workflow (e.g. research synthesis, prototyping acceleration, AI-assisted coding) and share it with the team so others can benefit

Within 1 quarter, you will…

• Own an end-to-end cycle: run discovery (or a design spike), translate insights into clear design decisions, and drive them through to delivery — building in the codebase alongside (or ahead of) the product engineers

• Improve how our existing components and patterns get used in practice — making them easier to reach for, and helping Product Engineers build with them consistently and correctly

• Help make our design quality bar explicit and shared with engineering, so it shows up consistently in what gets shipped

• Introduce at least one AI-assisted workflow that improves speed and/or quality (for example: AI-accelerated synthesis of qualitative research, faster prototyping, or content exploration)

• Partner with engineering (who also own data) to define what to measure and how to validate impact

Within 1 year, you will…

• Take ownership across whichever product areas need you most, become a reliable source of well-framed problems for the trio, and help shape the vision for Sharpist's hybrid human + AI coaching experience

• Create and standardize design patterns for our hybrid coaching experience (including conversational/adaptive AI interactions), while keeping the coach and learner in control

• Build and own the workflows around our design system, so Product Engineers can ship on-brand, on-vision features fast — with a clear path to the right components, sensible guardrails, and shared standards

• Raise the design quality of what engineering ships: lead by example, guide Product Engineers' delivery through crit and pairing, and help others build with clarity and confidence — in close partnership with the lead designer

And then, what's next?

• Use your product design engineering expertise to help shape the right direction for broader business impact

• Extend your influence across the product — from the learner hybrid coaching experience to coach and enterprise surfaces, wherever the biggest opportunities are