The Design Engineer
It's interesting how things can play out in your subconscious mind for a long time, but take a special kind of crystallisation for them to finally make sense to you.
That's what I'm beginning to realise now.
From 2025 into 2026, I watched the rise of design engineering — designers who could also code—and I started seriously considering whether it was something I could pursue. This effort of trying to combine software engineering with my design background is what finally crystallised the realisation: I've actually been seeing design engineering since 2021. The title didn't exist in my vocabulary then, but the concept itself was right in front of me. It'd been right in front of me all along.
When I first got into digital product design, I was immediately drawn to the big names, the FAANGs: Facebook (now Meta), Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google. As a career-driven person who wanted to be the best at what she does, those companies represented the peak of the UX Design profession. I was wrong. Now I know better. Anyway, whenever someone announced they'd joined Google, Meta, or Netflix, I would spend hours combing through their portfolios.
There was a platform called Cofolios, a curation of portfolios exclusively from designers working at the world's top companies: Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Dropbox, and about ten others. I visited Cofolios every single day. There was also Bestfolios. I'd spend hours on both, just looking and absorbing.
Now, looking back from 2026, I can see clearly what I was missing. Those designers, the ones getting hired by the best companies in the world, were design engineers. They could both design and code. But they never wore it as a badge. It wasn't plastered on their profiles as an obvious title, so it never registered with me.
The best designers at the best companies have mostly been design engineers.
And companies were softly asking for this all along. When job descriptions said "background in computer science or interaction design preferred," they were quietly filtering for people who could code. In the US and UK, students studying interaction design or HCI were sometimes writing code as part of their coursework, both front-end and back-end. That requirement wasn't arbitrary. Those were the people getting the internships. Their portfolios stood out because they weren't built on templates. They were coded from scratch.
I thought a lot of them were unicorns. It didn't occur to me that it was more normal than I assumed.
And honestly, part of me thought: I'm Nigerian, that reality is far from me. I can't possibly combine design and code.
But then came 2025, and Nigeria caught up. The designers rising the fastest and having the most impact and fun through their work were the ones who could both design and code. They had been design engineers for years. They just hadn't said it out loud. Now that there's visibility and value attached to the title, many of them are finally claiming it.
Another thing that made this hard to notice was that some 3-5 years ago, there was rarely such a thing as a "design engineer," at least not as a common title. The people doing exactly that work carried the title of product designer. Some of the best design engineers at leading companies today still bear the "product designer" title. There's a designer at Anthropic, for example, with roughly 13 years of experience in both design and development, who still goes by the title of a product designer, because that's what the role has always been called in his world.
So when Google posted product design roles that I never got past the application stage for, I now understand why. It wasn't just that my visual craft needed work; it was also that I couldn't code. The strongest candidates had both. They had an edge I didn't understand at the time.
Take Raphael Schaad, the designer who built Cron, a calendar app that Notion eventually acquired for a significant sum. He's a design engineer. He designed it and coded the early prototypes of the product himself. One thing I love about Raphael is that he's many things—designer, engineer, founder —but often, he prefers to go by the title of a designer.
Being a design engineer is great because they don't have to hand things off or wait. They can take an idea from concept all the way to a working product. It's a rare kind of creative autonomy.
Linear is another example. The designers there are exceptional, and they ship code directly alongside developers. So, this concept of design engineering has been happening for close to a decade. I just didn't know. I thought product design started and ended in Figma.
The first design engineer at DuckDuckGo, Karl Koch, had been designing and developing for years before his public title ever changed to show "design engineer". He does full-stack: front-end, back-end and mobile development. But for the longest time, his LinkedIn just said "product designer" before he eventually changed it to design engineer.
A lot of people like him exist. I found out that some admirable principal designers and founding designers that I look up to were actually quietly writing code in the background the whole time. And honestly, thank God for the rise of AI, because it finally made this obvious to me. It's normalising the idea that a designer can code. That it isn't a unicorn thing. That it's actually what the highest-level designers have been doing all along.
In all honesty, a small part of me is pained that it took me 5 years to see this clearly. I don’t know what I would have done differently if I had had this information earlier. But here in 2026, I have finally taken the bull by the horns and dived headfirst into writing code.
The more I think about it, though, the more I feel I'm right on time, even with the whole AI rigmarole. So I do not think I am behind. It just feels strange, looking back. Five years of staring at the portfolios of design engineers, and it never jumped out at me until now.
But maybe that's exactly how crystallisation works. You have to look at something long enough before you can finally see it.
Updates, May 2nd 2026
I have decided to add a public list of some of the insanely good design engineers whose works I keep going back to over the last few months.
Koen Bok - Product Designer and co-founder of Framer
Jorn Vandijk - Product Designer and co-founder of Framer
Aaron Aalto - Creative design engineer
RSMS - Designer, engineer, photographer, original designer of "Inter" typeface
Rachel Chen - Design engineer, impressive track record
Dara Sobaloju - Designer engineer, founder of Pewbeams
Linda Ojo - Design engineer at Paystack
Ayomide Daniel - Design engineer
Eugene Debrah - Design engineer
More to come…