Horizon: Design Engineer (Mid-level)

We’re looking for a Mid-Level Design Engineer to help scale Spear AI’s growth and products. Ideally, you are someone who loves the front of the front-end and can hold their own when it comes to design and UX concepts.

Spear AI is a growing defense contracting company dedicated to delivering cutting-edge solutions that support our nation’s security. As we expand, we’re building a culture where innovation meets mission-critical work. We operate with a flat structure that empowers every team member to make an impact, collaborate directly with leadership, and contribute to projects that matter. The work is technical, the problem space is dense, and the stakes are real. We ship in months, not years, and the people using what we build are operators, analysts, and warfighters.

We’re a small team wearing many hats, and you’d have a wide variety of responsibilities that include:

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  Product Building: Code production-ready prototypes, modular front-end components, and core user-facing features.

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  Proactive Polish: Spot opportunities to redesign or refine key features and flows, aggressively hunting down visual "paper cuts" and UX friction.

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  Collaborative Scoping: Participate in project kickoffs to understand the product and audience, actively proposing visual direction rather than waiting for a rigid specification sheet.

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  Setting Standards: Champion application performance, accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA), and codebase maintainability as first-class architectural concerns.

• Proven Capability: We care more about depth and taste than years on a resume, but successful candidates typically have 4+ years of Frontend or Design Engineer experience.

• Future-Proof Mindset: You write clean, maintainable code that doesn't constrain future product ambition.

• Pragmatic Tooling: You use LLMs as a tool, not a crutch: you independently audit their output, question their assumptions, and override them whenever a more elegant, human-engineered solution is required.

• Proven Product Taste: You possess a strong portfolio of shipped interfaces where you handled both the design and the front-end build, and can clearly explain your decisions and trade-offs.

• Workflow Empathy: You have a deep understanding of design workflows and the technical or hardware constraints that surround them.

• Obsession with Detail: You sweat the small stuff: animation, loading states, typography rhythm, accessibility, responsiveness, and runtime performance.

• Principled Courage: You have the confidence to ask hard questions, experiment wildly, and advocate for what you feel is right for the user.

• Relentless Curiosity: You treat every engineering bottleneck as a chance to dig deeper, constantly expanding your technical toolkit because you genuinely love figuring out how things work.

• Ambiguity Tolerance: You thrive when things are moving fast. Mission-critical work in defense isn't always tidy, and priorities shift. You stay calm, adjust, and iterate.

• Team-First Alignment: You make the team better. On a team of three, every hire shapes how we work. You bring your own strengths but check your ego at the door, taking your teammates' wins as your own.

• Clear Communication: You can explain a technical decision, a design rationale, or a complex trade-off in a clear way that lands perfectly with any audience.

• Modern Stack Fluency: Deep, professional experience with React, Next.js, and TypeScript.

• Advanced Styling: Highly fluent with Tailwind and modern CSS fundamentals (including container queries, cascade layers, specificity, OKLCH color spaces, view transitions, flexbox, and grid).

• Technical Auditing: A strong understanding of accessibility standards (WCAG 2.2) and core performance metrics (Core Web Vitals, Lighthouse).

• U.S. Citizenship: Must be a U.S. citizen.

• Security Clearance: Must be able to obtain or currently hold a Secret or Top Secret U.S. security clearance.