Design Engineer

Working at See Me Please means fewer layers, fewer hand-offs, and far more ownership than you've probably experienced before. There's no large design team to hide in, no neatly sequenced backlog of tickets, and dare we say it… no appetite for beautifully finessed Figma files that never make it into production. You'll see opportunities everywhere, make judgement calls with incomplete information, and ship things that are used quickly and visibly.

If you're looking for a tightly scoped design role with polished processes and clearly bounded responsibilities, this won't be the right environment. If you want full ownership over how the product looks, feels, and works, and you ship the code yourself, this is the role for you.

Title aside, this role suits a range of backgrounds. Designers who code. Product managers with strong design and engineering instincts. Frontend engineers with serious taste. We care more about how you think and what you've shipped than what your previous title said.

Why this role is different (and unusually strong for a startup)

While we are an early-stage company, we're not an idea-stage product. See Me Please has proven demand and established credibility, working as an enterprise service with organisations including Westpac, the Australian Government, multiple state governments, and leading universities as our early-adopting customers. The product you'll help shape is already valued by some of Australia's largest institutions to inform real decisions about accessibility, risk, and service design.

Your work here is deeply purposeful. You're not designing speculative concepts or marketing surfaces that never see daylight. You're shaping a product that is trusted, used, and valued by enterprise customers, and by testers whose lived experience directly informs better digital services. The work you contribute to also creates meaningful paid work for people who have experienced long-term barriers finding employment.

This is a rare design role. Accessibility isn't a constraint we work around, it is the product. Our customers come to us because we make universal usability tangible, and our platform is expected to be a working showcase of the standards we help others meet. You'll be the person most responsible for making that true, designing and shipping the interfaces yourself, with no handoffs flattening the work along the way.

You're not starting from scratch. We already have four live product surfaces — an insights portal where enterprise customers find meaning in the data, a testing platform where our diverse tester community does their work, an admin site where we oversee projects, and a marketing site that explains who we are. We also have a design system (@smp/ui) mid-flight, currently being introduced across our monorepo. Your job is to take full ownership of all of it: hold the tension between don't throw it out and raise the bar, and pull every surface onto the same elevated craft standard.

You'll also collaborate with academic computer science researchers on long-term, genuinely interesting problems at the intersection of accessibility, design, and technology, work that goes well beyond pixels and looks firmly to the horizon.

While we're a startup, we have exceptional backing. We are supported by equity-free funding from the Australian Government, recognising the innovation and social value of our product. We're now at a pivotal moment: very early, with proven customers, and intentionally investing in product depth, design maturity, and revenue growth as we scale into our first international market.

And finally, the team. No startup cosplay here. We're a small group of technologists and operators who've consciously escaped big-org bureaucracy to build something meaningful, modern, and refreshingly unburdened by process for process's sake.

What You'll Do

• Take ownership of the visual, interaction, and motion craft across the platform. Own the design of our insights portal, testing platform, and marketing site, and pull them onto a unified bar.

• Design, translate and ship your own designs directly into production React/TypeScript, in the same codebase as the rest of the engineering team. No handoffs, no Figma-to-code translation loss.

• Evolve the @smp/ui design system as the foundation that every surface builds on — components, tokens, patterns, motion, accessibility primitives.

• Set the craft bar that makes our platform a genuine showcase of universal usability, designed in from the start, not retrofitted.

• Collaborate directly with testers with lived experience of various disabilities, digital fluency, and literacy to validate that what you design works in the real world, not just on paper.

• Partner closely with engineering on what's buildable, with the founder team on how the brand shows up, and with researchers on what's worth exploring next.

• Help shape the patterns and ways of working that will need to scale as we expand into new markets.

What You Bring

• A strong portfolio of shipped product design work — we'll look at this first, code samples second.

• A clear point of view on visual hierarchy, typography, motion, and interaction craft, and the ability to defend and refine it.

• Comfort working directly in the codebase: TypeScript, modern React, and CSS. You don't need to be a senior engineer, but you need to ship what you design.

• Comfortable using Claude Code for the implementation side of design work — generating components, scaffolding screens, automating accessibility checks. We use it heavily; you should too.

• Genuine curiosity about accessibility — you don't need to be a WCAG encyclopaedia, but you need to care deeply about designing for everyone.

• Experience inheriting in-flight work and raising the bar without throwing it out. The ability to hold the tension between what's there and what could be.

• Comfort in a startup: priorities shift, ambiguity is the steady state, and systems are far from perfect.

• Clear communication and the ability to explain why, not just what.

Nice to Have

• Direct experience designing for accessibility — screen readers, low-vision, motor, cognitive.

• Experience contributing to or owning a design system in production.

• Experience designing data-dense interfaces — dashboards, reports, analytics.

• Familiarity with Next.js, Tailwind, or component-library patterns (Radix, shadcn, etc.).

• Background working with researchers, testers, or other stakeholders with lived experience.

• Lived experience of disability or assistive technology use.

What You'll Shape

• The visual and interaction language of every surface our customers and testers touch.

• The @smp/ui design system as the foundation that scales with us into new markets.

• How customers experience and understand accessibility insights.

• The tools our diverse tester community uses every day.

This role will suit someone who enjoys designing in motion; where problems are visible, feedback is direct, and the impact of your work shows up quickly. If you read this and felt energised rather than anxious, we should talk.

Our Engineering Values

• Accessibility first: We build for everyone, testing with real users.

• Ship iteratively: Deliver value early and often.

• Own your work: Take responsibility from design through to production.

• Learn continuously: Embrace new technologies and approaches.

• Communicate openly: Share context, ask questions, give feedback.

• AI-fluent: We use modern AI tooling (Claude Code in particular) as a force multiplier, applied with judgment, not as a crutch.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary based on experience and role.

• Equity participation in a growing startup.

• Flexible working arrangements.

• MacBook Pro and home office setup.

• Claude Code Max (5x) subscription, included for every engineer — we use AI tooling seriously and expect you to as well.

• Opportunity to make genuine impact on digital accessibility.

Location

We're headquartered in Sydney, Australia. These roles are based in Sydney — primarily in-office, with sensible flexibility to work from home as needed. We believe the work we're doing benefits enormously from being in the same room often: workshops with testers, design crits, architecture conversations, and founder huddles all happen better in person. Expect to be in the office most days. This isn't a remote role.

How to Apply

Send your CV, your portfolio, and a brief note about why you're interested to ***email_hidden***. We'd love to hear about a project you're proud of and what drew you to this role.

• See Me Please is an equal opportunity employer. We actively encourage applications from people with disabilities and those from underrepresented backgrounds.