Junior Design Engineer

We know applying for jobs is exhausting. Endless text full of buzzwords and requirements you'll never actually use. We'll skip that.

We're vvd. We make tools for storytellers — worldbuilders, writers, creators. Our goal is simple: empower people to create worlds, stories, and experiences that others can get lost in.

We're still at the beginning of our own story, and we're looking for a few people to help write the next chapters. In a moment where "AI creative tools" are pumping out slop on one side and vicious debate on the other, we're choosing a different path: use this technology to empower human creativity and craft, not replace it.

This is a junior role, which means we don't expect you to have a long résumé. We expect curiosity, taste, and the kind of hunger that has you rebuilding things on weekends just to see if you can. You'll be mentored by senior design engineers, but you'll also ship real features that real people use. From day one, you'll be able to point to things in the product and say: I built that.

What you'll do

You're a design engineer in the making — someone drawn to the place where how things look meets how they work. You like designing interfaces, and you like coding them too. You care whether a button feels right, not just whether it works.

You'll help design and implement features end-to-end, with guidance from the team. You'll move fast — we mean it — using AI-powered dev tools (Cursor, Claude Code, etc.) to punch above your weight and ship at a pace that wouldn't otherwise be possible. You'll contribute to the frontend experience: layout, interaction, motion, polish. You'll work directly with engineering and product, iterate in hours instead of weeks, and communicate plainly. No corporate padding.

Extra pluses

Experience playing with Figma or similar design tools for prototyping. You care about accessibility. You read fiction, build worlds, or make things for fun.

Requirements

What we care about

Formal experience isn't a gate. We care that you've built and shipped something real — a side project, a class project, a personal site, a small app, a Discord bot, a game, a Figma plugin, anything — and that you can walk us through what you built, why you built it that way, what broke, and how you solved it. Ownership and curiosity matter more than pedigree.

Specifically

Working knowledge of modern frontend (React, TypeScript, Next.js or similar) — you don't need to be an expert, but you should be comfortable building real UI from scratch. Taste: you can look at an interface and feel what's working and what isn't, even if you can't always articulate why yet. The ability to take a rough idea and turn it into something interactive without waiting for a detailed spec. You use AI tools daily — not as a crutch, but as a multiplier. You know how to prompt, iterate, and ship with them. Some basic understanding of how the backend fits in (APIs, data flow, auth) so you're not totally blocked when something breaks. You've built at least one thing where motion or interaction felt genuinely good — not just functional.