Design Engineer

A Design Engineer at Authorium designs and ships. You take an idea from a rough concept to a polished, production interface running in front of real government users, and you work highly independently through that process with a clear feedback loop., Government workflows are complex by nature. Our users manage procurement solicitations, evaluation scoring, contract documents, and compliance reporting and often for the first time on a digital platform. Making dense, high-stakes workflows feel navigable for people who didn't choose the tool and can't easily change their process is our baseline challenge - and an Authorium Design Engineer relishes that challenge and has a desire to live on both the design and engineering side of delivery., * Take features from concept through interaction design, prototyping, and production front-end implementation. You write the code that ships, not just the spec for it.

• Build and maintain real interfaces in our codebase (Hotwire / Next.js), partnering with Engineering on architecture, state, and performance.
• Use Claude Design and other AI tooling to move fast: rapid prototypes, multiple directions, working components and bring strong judgment about which output is actually good.

Shape the product surface

• Improve UX across the platform from intake, approvals, document generation, evaluations, configuration, and reporting including fixing inconsistencies and usability gaps as you go.
• Contribute to the design system: components, patterns, and libraries that keep the product coherent and speed up everyone's delivery. You'll both use it and extend it in code.
• Help shape how AI shows up in the product with making AuthorAI feel context-aware and trustworthy for users across every level of AI comfort.

Ship with quality

• Design and build for accessibility and compliance from the start (WCAG 2.1 AA) - our government customers require it.
• Review your work against design intent through delivery and hold the bar on fidelity and polish.
• Work in sprints; manage your work in Jira and participate in planning and grooming.

Collaborate

• Partner with PMs to frame problems and make scope tradeoffs, and with Engineering on feasibility and front-end quality.
• Talk to users: lightweight usability checks, observing real workflows, and turning what you learn into better interfaces.

Do you have experience in WCAG?, * 2-3 years building digital products where you both designed and implemented the front end portfolios that show shipped work, not just mockups.

• Strong front-end engineering: Next.js, modern CSS, and comfort working in a real production codebase.
• Strong design craft: interaction design, layout, and a sharp eye for detail in dense, data-heavy interfaces with tables, filters, multi-step flows, role-based views.
• Demonstrated fluency with Claude Design (and/or comparable AI design/build tools) used as a serious part of how you ship and please show us examples.
• Proficiency in Figma (components, libraries, auto-layout, prototyping).
• Comfort with ambiguity and a bias toward shipping and you make judgment calls with incomplete information and move between design and code in the same day.
• Understanding of accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1 AA).
• Clear communication as you can explain a decision in terms of user outcomes and tradeoffs, not just aesthetics.

Nice to Have

• Experience with dense, workflow-driven enterprise / B2B products.
• Exposure to government, public sector, or other regulated/compliance-driven environments.
• Experience with product analytics tools (Pendo, Mixpanel, Amplitude, or similar).
• Experience integrating AI features into a product UI.

Compensation Range: $135K - $160K

Authorium is transforming how government agencies manage complex, document-centric workflows. Our platform integrates essential administrative functions from procurement to contracting to budgeting and into a unified system that drives efficiency, compliance, and visibility for public-sector teams. We're approaching Series B. We're also investing in AI capabilities - both internally and externally - building workflows trained specifically for government operations, and building an AI-first operational culture internally to accelerate our work and go further. AI isn't a side project here - it's reshaping both what we build and how we build it.