Senior Design Engineer (Freelance)

Location: United States

Department: Creative

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.
• Comes with a long-term product mindset over agency delivery habits. This is an early-stage, pre-product-market-fit seat where you help decide what the product becomes. The team is looking for someone whose first instinct is to ask what a decision does to the product a year out, and who argue against technical debt and care about long-term metrics.

You bring 

• React / Next.js for the product surface
• Supabase for data and backend
• Figma MCP to reach into design systems
• A model-agnostic mindset: We do not build against one LLM. Interoperability is a product requirement: BRDNA Sequencer has to land in Figma, Claude, ChatGPT, and Frontify alike, so nothing you build may assume a single provider's behavior. In practice, this raises the bar on your prompt work, which has to hold up across models rather than be tuned until it works on one.
• Cursor & Claude Code

Bonus points if

• Figma is a platform to you, not just a canvas: You have worked with Variables, the Plugin or REST API, Code Connect, and library architecture across multiple consuming teams.
• You have applied retrieval and embeddings in practice: You understand chunking strategy, RAG, fine-tuning, LoRAs, and what makes encoding and decoding work - and why.
• You rely on evals, not intuition: You measure model output systematically rather than eyeballing it, and you have built the harness to do it.
• You have driven self-serve and product-led growth: You have shipped an onboarding flow and watched activation numbers move because of a change you made.
• You have navigated 0→1→10: You have been early somewhere and know what that costs, as well as how to maintain it once customers are actively using the product.

Project Details:

• Duration: 10/19/26 - 12/18/26
• Schedule 40+ hours per week, Monday through Friday

*This role is based in the United States and candidates must be located within the United States. 

The hiring range for this position is $4,000 to $6,500 per week. Where an employee or prospective employee is paid within this range will depend on, among other factors, actual ranges for current/former employees in the subject position; budgetary considerations; tenure and standing with the company (applicable to current employees); as well as the employee’s/applicant’s applicable skills, pertinent experience, and qualifications.