17 Design Engineers to Know If You’re Building a Career in Design Engineering

One of the hottest terms in tech right now may be design engineering. Coding agents can make features, but making the connection between a person and a product feel seamless is a different problem. You cannot build that seamlessness without taste. It also needs broad domain knowledge and solid optimization behind it.

Anyone can make a design in Figma or Sketch now. Translating it into code with all of its fine detail is another matter. Those details lead to a product experience that feels exceptional, yet most people are too busy getting something implemented and working to give them that attention.

I especially like Emil Kowalski and Amelia Wattenberger. I have studied by absorbing Emil’s work and ideas, and the research posts on Amelia’s personal blog are exactly my taste. I wait for every new post because their work consistently sparks a fresh idea.

In case it is useful to others, I made this list.

1. Emil Kowalski

• Affiliation: Linear (formerly Vercel)
• Web & social:
• Website: emilkowal.ski
• X (Twitter): @emilkowalski
• GitHub: github.com/emilkowalski
• About: Creator of Sonner, a popular React toast-notification library; Vaul, a drawer component; and animations.dev, a web-animation learning platform. He is especially strong at UI interaction and micro-animation design.

2. Josh Puckett

• Affiliation: iteration.design (co-founder)
• Web & social:
• Website: joshpuckett.me
• X (Twitter): @joshpuckett
• About: He has led design and engineering teams at Dropbox, Wealthfront, and Groupon, and co-founded Upperstudy, a studio for developing designers. He also runs Interface Craft, a library about interface precision and detail.

3. Raphael Salaja

• Affiliation: Warp (warpdotco)
• Web & social:
• Website: raphaelsalaja.com
• X (Twitter): @raphaelsalaja
• About: An Ireland-based design engineer who has worked with OpenSea and Avara. His focus is finely tuned, emotional interaction direction, including sound in web interactions and physics-based spring animation.

4. Gavin Nelson

• Affiliation: OpenAI (formerly Linear and GitHub)
• Web & social:
• Website: nelson.co
• X (Twitter): @gavin_nelson
• About: He leads product interaction and UI/UX work for ChatGPT. He is recognized for exceptionally polished prototyping and high-quality iOS and macOS app-icon design.

5. Shad (shadcn)

• Affiliation: Vercel (AI Team)
• Web & social:
• Website: shadcn.com
• X (Twitter): @shadcn
• GitHub: github.com/shadcn
• About: Creator of shadcn/ui, one of the most widely used component-module systems in modern web development, and a co-founder of Vercel’s AI app builder v0. He is a defining figure in the open-source component ecosystem.

6. floguo (Flora / Flo Guo)

• Affiliation: Paradigm (founding design engineer; formerly Vercel)
• Web & social:
• Website: floguo.com
• X (Twitter): @floguo
• About: Lead design engineer at Paradigm, a Web3 and crypto investment firm. Her restrained aesthetic, typography, and calm but sophisticated interfaces have drawn attention.

7. Paco Coursey

• Affiliation: Linear (webmaster / design engineer; formerly Vercel)
• Web & social:
• Website: paco.me
• X (Twitter): @pacocoursey
• About: Creator of ⌘K (cmdk), which has become a standard command-palette UI, and Next Themes for Next.js. He leads Linear’s minimal, fast, and beautiful web-brand experience and UI system.

8. Rauno Freiberg

• Affiliation: Vercel
• Web & social:
• Website: rauno.me
• X (Twitter): @raunofreiberg
• About: A master of interaction who says he “paints with the medium of code.” He has designed many of Vercel’s signature interactions and continually publishes fresh, tactile UI experiments through his personal archive, rauno.me/craft.

9. Daehyeon Mun

• Affiliation: Expo
• Web & social:
• Website: daehyeon.dev
• X (Twitter): @DaehyeonMun
• GitHub: github.com/daehyeonmun2021
• About: A design engineer at Expo, the cross-platform mobile framework. He has released projects including react-native-skia-lab, a high-quality graphics and animation demo made with React Native Skia, and react-native-neon-city, an interactive game built with Expo. His work researches and implements fluid motion and graphic interaction in mobile interfaces.

10. Steve Ruiz

• Affiliation: tldraw (founder & CEO)
• Web & social:
• Website: steveruiz.me
• X (Twitter): @steveruizok
• About: Creator of tldraw, an infinite-canvas whiteboard tool. His AI demo Make Real, which turns hand-drawn interface sketches on a canvas directly into working code, made a major impression in web development and UI.

11. Bartosz Ciechanowski

• Affiliation: Independent interactive creator
• Web & social:
• Website: ciechanow.ski
• X (Twitter): @FearAndScience
• About: Often called a master of interactive web simulations. His blog is known for letting readers understand complex science and engineering—from mechanical watches and internal-combustion engines to GPS and sound—by directly manipulating 3D interactive models.

12. Amelia Wattenberger

• Affiliation: SHV (formerly GitHub Next)
• Web & social:
• Website: wattenberger.com
• X (Twitter): @wattenberger
• About: At GitHub Next she worked as a researcher on data visualization (D3.js) and next-generation developer-tool interfaces. Her technical articles combine distinctive illustration with visual simulation and inspire many designers and engineers.

13. Shu Ding

• Affiliation: Vercel
• Web & social:
• Website: shud.in
• About: A key developer behind SWR, a leading React data-fetching library, and a design engineer at Vercel. From the polished interactions in the official Next.js documentation to the v0 UI system, he demonstrates both elegant interface work and front-end engineering depth.

14. Pedro Duarte

• Affiliation: Vercel (formerly Modulz)
• Web & social:
• Website: pedroduarte.me
• X (Twitter): @peduarte
• About: Creator of Radix UI, the well-known accessibility-first component library, and Stitches, a CSS-in-JS tool. He has made an exceptional contribution to narrowing the gap between design systems and developer experience (DX).

15. Andy Allen

• Affiliation: Not Boring Software (founder)
• Web & social:
• Website: andy.works
• X (Twitter): @asallen
• About: Founder and interaction designer of Not Boring, the studio that radically reimagines mundane utility apps—weather, calculator, and habit tracking—through 3D game engines, immersive haptics, and sound effects.

16. Bret Victor

• Affiliation: Dynamicland (founder; formerly Apple)
• Web & social:
• Website: worrydream.com
• About: A leading figure in HCI and interface design. He led early iPad UI prototyping at Apple, and his landmark talk “Inventing on Principle” provided much of the intellectual foundation for modern design engineering.

17. Szymon Kaliski

• Affiliation: Replit (formerly Ink & Switch)
• Web & social:
• Website: szymonkaliski.com
• X (Twitter): @szymon_k
• About: A design engineer working across research-oriented software lab Ink & Switch and Replit. He continually publishes interactive experiments, breadboard tools for coding, and distinctive node-based interface explorations.