Senior Design Engineer - Top of Funnel

What you’ll do:

• Bring design intent to life. Our brand designers work at high velocity, producing considered, high-fidelity layouts. Your job is to carry that work forward, with enough taste to honor the intention and enough craft to make it feel native to the web.
• Bring the web platform to the table, not just the design spec. You’ll surface what’s newly possible in browsers, propose enhancements that design didn’t know to ask for, and advocate for approaches that make experiences feel alive rather than translated from a static file.
• Implement animation and interaction that earns attention. Product launches, campaign pages, and editorial moments require more than accurate layouts. They require pacing, motion, and detail; you’ll own that layer.
• Build and extend the design system. The web site’s design system is both the guardrail and the creative toolbox. You’ll identify when a component needs to stretch to cover a new use case, and build those extensions in a way that fits rather than fights the system.
• Work directly with brand designers and marketing as a peer. This isn’t an execution role, it’s a creative partner role. You’ll be in the room during concepting, not just receiving tickets at the end.
• Set the quality bar for Mercury’s front door. You’ll have a point of view about what exceptional looks like on the web, and the mandate to advocate for it.

The ideal candidate:

• Has a portfolio of crafted work that demonstrates both engineering quality and design sensibility.
• Has been the technical lead of complex projects with many stakeholders with a track record of success.
• Has deep command of HTML and CSS as a creative medium, not just a layout tool. You know what the platform can do and you stay current on what’s new
• Is fluent in the web animation stack — from CSS transitions to GSAP to the Web Animations API — and knows which tool fits which problem. Understands that motion on the web is a performance concern as much as a design one.
• Is proficient in React and Next.js, particularly in a content-heavy, pre-rendered marketing context.
• Has experience working within and extending a design system, with pragmatic opinions about when to use what’s there vs. when to build something new.
• Has worked closely with brand designers or creative directors in previous roles and knows how to navigate strong design opinions.
• Cares about performance as an extension of craft: a slow or janky interaction isn’t just a technical problem, it’s a design failure.