Design Engineer
US$4,000 – US$6,500 / wk base salary
Posted 15 Oct 2026
Advertised as “Senior Design Engineer (Freelance)”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Management level
- Individual contributor
- Contract
- Freelance
| Base salary | US$4,000 – US$6,500 / wk |
|---|
About AIP
AIP is R/GA AI Products, the global group that builds R/GA's own products rather than client campaigns. Its first product, BRDNA Sequencer™, launched September 2026 and teaches coding agents to build on-brand.
BRDNA Sequencer makes a brand machine-readable. It takes the design system, components, patterns, voice and rules a brand keeps in Figma files and PDFs, and encodes them into structured context a coding agent can read and act on. Point an agent at a brand, hand it a creative brief, and it works in Figma and Claude using the right components, without a human checking every output against the style guide.
It is not a chatbot or a template generator, it's a collaboration tool. It's a way to encode a design system and create new designs from it while working alongside the designer or marketer.
About the role
You turn design systems into something an AI can build with. This role centers on a product that translates Figma designs into markdown, lets AI manipulate them, and translates them back, with the challenge being a faithful round trip across any brand. You'll need hands-on experience building and maintaining a design system plus real prompt engineering craft, and you'll own the customer-facing front end, including the onboarding and self-serve flow.
The ideal person
- Is a product-focused design engineer owning an AI-to-Figma encoding pipeline. The core of the role is able to move from Figma design systems (components, tokens, rules, voice) encoded into structured markdown and a vector space agents retrieve from, then translated back into real Figma designs. The goal is consistent, on-brand output across any brand, with no meaningful run-to-run variance. You'll constantly diagnose whether problems come from the source system, structure, retrieval, or prompt, and no settled practice exists yet.
- Has a Dual expertise in design systems and AI fluency. You’ll have owned a design system through real product-team adoption and change, and built layered, multi-hierarchy prompt systems that have shipped production-grade output. You’ll need to have methods for locating which layer is at fault when output degrades, and prompt work that holds up across models (Claude, ChatGPT, Figma, Frontify) rather than being tuned to one provider.
- You’ll thrive with end-to-end ownership of onboarding and the product surface. You'll audit and rebuild the self-serve journey from "we have a Figma library" to "our agents are building on-brand," then design and build the front end yourself, with no handoff, alongside full-stack engineers. You'll set self-serve KPIs with leadership and research and let the metrics settle debates. The aim is turning a services-heavy offering into a scalable product.