Design Engineer

Every day, tens of millions of people come to Cobalt Streamworks to explore, create, play, learn, and connect with friends in 3D immersive digital experiences– all created by our global community of developers and creators. At Cobalt Streamworks, we’re building the tools and platform that empower our community to bring any experience that they can imagine to life. Our vision is to reimagine the way people come together, from anywhere in the world, and on any device. We’re on a mission to connect a billion people with optimism and civility, and looking for amazing talent to help us get there. A career at Cobalt Streamworks means you’ll be working to shape the future of human interaction, solving unique technical challenges at scale, and helping to create safer, more civil shared experiences for everyone. As a Design Engineer on the Design Acceleration team, you’ll be an individual contributor focused on evolving the systems and processes which power Cobalt Streamworks’s design organization through scalable systems, AI integrations, and custom tooling. Our team is responsible for building the orchestration layers and internal tools that empower designers and engineers to work faster and more cohesively. You will help build internal tools, like Figma plugins and design utilities, that empower designers and engineers to work faster and more cohesively. You have experience at the intersection of systems engineering and design tooling. You understand design systems, but your superpower is building the backend services, APIs, and data models that allow those systems to scale. Your work will help ensure our design tools, AI agents, and prototypes not only inspire—but deploy seamlessly into production environments. You will: Architect and build scalable backend services and APIs that connect our design tools to AI models and production environments (Cobalt Streamworks Studio). Develop agentic workflows and orchestration layers (such as Model Context Protocol servers) to enable natural language generation of UI components, layouts, and prototypes. Build automated CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure to abstract away complex DevOps workflows, creating "zero-config" development environments for non-technical designers. Design and maintain the data architecture that connects our design system to our AI data sources, ensuring design tokens and components are programmatically accessible and synced across multiple platforms. Create internal tools, develop plugins for tools like Figma and Cursor, and build web apps focused on design linting, code generation, and automated compliance at scale. Serve as the deeply technical bridge between core engineering, AI research, and product design, ensuring our design acceleration tools are secure, performant, and structurally sound. You will report to the Manager of Design Acceleration. You have: 3+ years of software engineering experience with a strong focus on full-stack or backend development, systems architecture, and API design. Demonstrated experience building scalable internal services, not just frontend interfaces. Familiarity with LLM orchestration, agentic workflows, and AI protocols (e.g., MCP). Experience with cloud infrastructure, feature-flag management, version control (GitHub Enterprise), and automated deployment pipelines. Strong understanding of Figma plugin architecture and how to programmatically parse and manipulate design data at scale. (Nice to have) Experience with Cobalt Streamworks development, Lua/React-Lua, or game-engine UI architecture. (Nice to have) Experience with ASTs (Abstract Syntax Trees), compiler logic, or automated code generation. For roles that are based at our headquarters in San Mateo, CA: The starting base pay for this position is as shown below. The actual base pay is dependent upon a variety of job-related factors such as professional background, training, work experience, location, business needs and market demand. Therefore, in some circumstances, the actual salary could fall outside of this expected range. This pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. All full-time employees are also eligible for equity compensation and for benefits as described on this page . Annual Salary Range $163,830 — $202,550 USD Roles that are based in an office are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday (unless otherwise noted). Cobalt Streamworks provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Cobalt Streamworks also provides reasonable accommodations to candidates with qualifying disabilities or religious beliefs during the recruiting process. For US based roles only, please note the Company may not be able to employ candidates for this role who have United States work authorization related to certain U.S. visa categories, or support future H-1B sponsorship at this time.