On Design Engineering

At some point in every conversation, it would come up.

Which one are you—designer or developer? As if the answer had to be one or the other. As if the work cared.

I’ve been a Product Designer for about ten years. Before that, UX Designer, then UX/UI Designer—the titles shift with whatever the industry decides to call the same job every few years. I got used to it.

What I never got used to was leaving half of what I could do off the table every time I walked into a room.

Because alongside the design work, I was always building things. Mobile apps, marketing websites with custom CMS setups, a JAMStack course app, time spent in a large B2B SaaS codebase.

Not as a side curiosity—as part of the job, because it was faster, because ssomething wasn’t translating in handoff, because I wanted to know if what I’d designed actually held up when someone built it.

Every new client was a small reveal: oh, you can build it too. Like it was a bonus feature rather than just how I worked.

I tried positioning myself as someone who could do both. It never landed. The conversations would get strange—but which one are you really—and I’d end up retreating to Product Design because it was easier to sell and, at the time, more profitable.

There was a moment where I nearly went the other way entirely and just committed to front-end development. I’m glad I didn’t. Not because it’s lesser, but because the design thinking is the part I can’t separate from the rest.

It’s not a skill I have, it’s how I see problems.

Design Engineer is the title that exists now. It describes someone who works fluidly across both—not a designer who dabbles, not a developer who can use Figma, but someone for whom the boundary was always a bit arbitrary.

The discipline is young, Vercel and a handful of companies building in public have done most of the work legitimising it.

AI is accelerating that—not because it makes the job easier, but because it’s exposing the gap between teams that can only design or only build and the ones that can do both and know which matters when.

That gap is becoming expensive. The discipline is filling it.

I’m aware it could still turn out to be a moment rather than a movement, but it’s the first title in ten years that matches what I actually do. That’s not nothing.

What changes is what I can sell. The ability to design and build the same thing, to hold the intention and the implementation at the same time—that has value, and now there’s language for it.

What doesn’t change is the work itself. I was always doing this. Now I just don’t have to explain it away.