Design Engineer

This is Cradle

Proteins are the molecular machines of life, used for many therapeutic, diagnostic, chemical, agricultural and food applications. Designing and optimizing proteins takes a lot of expert knowledge and manual effort, through the use of custom computational and biological tools.

Machine learning is revolutionizing this space, by enabling high-fidelity protein models. At Cradle, we offer a software platform for AI-guided discovery and optimization of proteins, so that biologists can design proteins faster and at scale. We are already used by clients across biopharma, biotech, agri-tech, food-tech, and academia.

We're an experienced team of around 90 people. We've built many successful products before and have enough funding for multiple years of runway. We are distributed across two main locations, Zurich and Amsterdam, and are focused on building the best possible team culture.

We offer our employees a very competitive salary, a generous equity stake in the company and a wide range of benefits and career progression opportunities.

What we're building

At Cradle, we're building a platform that lets biologists use machine learning to design and optimize proteins, faster and at scale. Our users are scientists running complex, mission-critical workflows: designing experiments, preparing and reviewing training data, configuring and running ML models, and interpreting results across multiple cycles of iteration.

The product surface is unusually rich and fast-moving. Biological sequence data, experiment tracking, model configuration, data preparation pipelines, and dense result exploration views all sit in a single platform, and the underlying ML capabilities keep evolving. The interfaces around them have to evolve just as quickly, in the hands of domain experts who hold a high bar for clarity and craft.

We're looking for a Design Engineer to help us build it.

About the role

This is a product role with leverage: you'll work fluidly across UX research, visual design, and frontend engineering, picking up wherever the most useful work is, prototyping in code when a static design can't capture what an interaction needs to feel like, and shipping with our frontend engineers when something is ready to scale into production.

You will join experienced designers, frontend engineers and UX researchers who care deeply about the craft of the product. You bring a point of view on how features should behave, contributing to how the team works, and pull work towards concrete, shippable decisions while retaining a high quality bar.

You don't need a biology background. You do need to find complex, data-dense product surfaces genuinely interesting and care about getting them right.

What you'll do

Work across our core product surfaces. Experiment design and tracking, ML workflow configuration (design, train, generate cycles), data preparation tooling, and result exploration views that help scientists understand what an unfamiliar ML output is actually telling them. You learn which details are load-bearing, which are surface polish, and which are pinned by constraints that won't move, then translate that understanding into accurate, complete, and understandable interfaces.

Hold the bar on how features feel. Care deeply about transitions, states, edge cases, and data-heavy views, not just static mockups. Bring visual excellence to dense, structured interfaces: hierarchy that holds up under information density, restraint about what earns space on screen, and pixel-level craft that signals to expert users that someone thought about every choice.

Code as a first-class output. When the right interaction isn't obvious, build it. Working prototypes are how you test with users, align design and engineering, and replace long debate cycles with something people can click through. You take visual design through to pixel fidelity implementation in a modern frontend stack (TypeScript, CSS, React), building and adjusting components, layouts, and interaction details yourself.

What you bring

Must-haves

• Strong design taste and sharp attention to that shows up both visually and in how an interface behaves across its real-world states. A portfolio of shipped product work demonstrates this best.

• Experience creating and maintaining design systems, with deep care for layout, motion, affordances, color and visual polish

• Self-starter with an end-to-end owner's mindset. Bias to ship and polish through iteration. You move from ambiguous problem to testable prototype quickly, and you can fluently use AI-native tooling (Claude, Cursor, etc) to compress the iteration cycle.

• Expertise in modern front-end technologies, especially Typescript, CSS, React, and component-driven architectures.

• Strong communicator who builds shared understanding across scientists, designers, and engineers.

• Typically 5+ years of relevant work, though depth and quality of what you've shipped matter more than years on a CV.

Nice to have

• Experience designing expert tooling for practitioner audiences: surfaces where interface complexity is earned by the depth of the underlying domain. Think Houdini, Hex, Final Cut Pro, Benchling, or any modern IDE.

• Experience designing data-dense interfaces. Charts, tables, and quantitative displays where the encoding choice matters. You don't need to be a statistician, but you have opinions about how to make complex information legible.

• Experience with application-level frontend concerns like state management, data fetching, and API integration, so you can take features further into production on your own

• Background in biotech, research tools, or developer tooling.

Our commitment to inclusive hiring

Cradle evaluates all candidates based on merit, regardless of sex, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic background, or any other aspect of identity. We maintain zero tolerance for discrimination and actively encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply.

AI disclosure

Cradle uses an applicant tracking system that includes basic AI-assisted features which may generate scores or rankings based on how applications match a job description. These outputs are not used to make or meaningfully influence hiring decisions — all candidates are evaluated through a thorough, human-led review by our recruiting team.

A notice about recruitment scams

Please be aware that scammers are posing as us in order to get your personal details or money. We only communicate via @cradle.bio email addresses, we only make job offers after having met you in person at our office in Zurich or Amsterdam, and we never ask you to pay for anything during the interview process.