Design Engineer

Description

Pixelmatters is a digital product studio. We’re a team of strategists, designers, and engineers creating top-quality digital products.

Our mission is to empower businesses to achieve their full potential by creating top-quality digital products, while fostering great relationships along the way. We envision a world where great user experience is the norm, not the exception, inspiring businesses and people to be at their best.

We’re looking for you — an autonomous, curious, and flexible Design Engineer with a genuine obsession for how interfaces feel, not just how they look.

Your role sits at the intersection of design and engineering. You'll build websites as systems of reusable blocks, assemble templates and pages from them, and prepare the CMS that powers them. You’ll create the interactions, micro-interactions, and animations that make our work feel alive, and when a mockup leaves something unspecified, you're the person who decides what happens between the states. We work with agentic AI tools as a team, which means the mechanical parts of this work keep getting faster, and your judgment becomes the part that matters most.

Some of your day-to-day tasks will include building, maintaining, and optimizing websites across different tech stacks, from design handoff to live delivery, ensuring quality, performance, accessibility, and security on every launch. You'll work closely with designers to bring interactions and animations to life, and use agentic AI tools daily to speed up the repetitive parts of the work. You'll be hands-on with code while keeping an eye on the bigger picture, understanding how your technical decisions impact the end product and the user experience.

You're someone who takes pride in the end result and holds yourself to a high standard, not because someone asked, but because that's how you work.

Requirements

• At least 3 years of experience as a Front-End Engineer or Design Engineer.

• Solid grasp of semantic HTML, modern CSS, and SEO fundamentals.

• Experience with React and Next.js, including building websites as systems of reusable components.

• Experience implementing interactions, animations, and micro-interactions.

• Experience working with Content Management Systems (Payload CMS and/or WordPress, but others are valuable), including modeling content structures and preparing content migrations.

• Fluency with agentic AI tools (such as Claude Code or Cursor) as a regular part of your development workflow.

• Ability to deliver solutions that meet high standards of performance, accessibility, and cross-browser and device compatibility.

• Familiar with version control systems such as Git.

• Effective and clear communication with engineers and designers.

• Good understanding of English and Portuguese (written and spoken).

It would be awesome if you also have...

• Proficiency using utility-first libraries such as Tailwind CSS, and component libraries such as shadcn/ui.

• Experience extending AI tools rather than just using them, such as writing custom skills and commands, building MCP integrations, or setting up agent-based workflows.

• Experience with motion libraries such as Motion (Framer Motion) or GSAP.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and benefits, including health insurance.

• We have a brand new office located at Porto’s downtown, while continuing to back our “Remote as default, Office as an option” policy https://www.pixelmatters.com/blog/remote-as-default-office-as-an-option-our-remote-work-approach.

• Agentic AI tooling provided from day one, including a Claude Code license and a shared library of team-built skills, commands, and integrations.

• A design-led environment where craft is the standard, and where engineers work side by side with designers rather than downstream of them.

Compensation

• The salary range from this role is between €32,485.00 to €53,485.00 annual gross, which includes meal, vacation and Xmas allowances.