Robin Spielmann — Munich, and remote
Design Engineer with 8+ years of experience in building digital products, web applications and design systems.
Focus on scalable interfaces and a close collaboration between design and development. What I care about most is the part after the code works: how something feels, the states nobody planned for and the system behind it.
- Focus
- Design systems, web applications, digital products
- Tools
- TypeScript, React, Next.js, Astro, Tailwind, Storybook, Figma, Claude Code, Claude Design
- Languages
- German (native), English (fluent)
What's a Design Engineer?
Since there isn't (yet) a universally accepted definition for this job description, here's my take on the skills a design engineer can bring to a team.
Building it for real
A design engineer is being able to implement the interfaces and work together with other developers on the codebase. Nothing gets lost between the design and what ships, and the person who drew it handles the part a design file can't hold: real-world cases, the states nobody sketched, accessibility, performance.
Look and feel
It's not just important how a product looks, but also how it feels while it's being used. Microinteractions, states, the small bits of feedback that confirm something happened. On most teams nobody owns that part. A design engineer is the person who does.
Longevity
Shipping a product once isn't the job. A design engineer helps setting the guidelines and rules together with the design and development team, so the quality doesn't erode with every feature added after launch.
Speaking both languages
Designers and developers judge the same work by different criteria. The design engineer speaks both, and keeps the two sides building one thing instead of talking past each other.
All of this matters more than it ever has. Writing code stopped being the bottleneck a while ago. Keeping a product consistent and the quality high is the hard part now, and teams ship faster than ever, which means more chances to pull it out of shape. Holding it together is what this role is for.
Where I come from
I started in graphic design. Then I studied media computer science, because I wanted to build the things I was drawing. Then a master's in interactive media, because building them had taught me things about designing them. Looking back, it reads less like three changes of direction and more like the same subject approached from three sides.
Professionally I went deep on front-end. Years of building interfaces for production, with a fair amount of architecture and under-the-hood work underneath them. Often quite technical, but never really about the code. Code is the vehicle. What has to come out right is whether the product is any good.
The design half never stopped either. I kept building design systems meant to still hold up a year later, and adding the micro-animations that make a product feel like it responds properly, usually the first thing cut when time gets short. I also ran coding workshops and mentored the developers coming up behind me, which does much the same job as a design system: get the shared language right, and the team builds consistently without anyone having to police it.
Companies I've worked with
- Union Investment
- Scout24
- Caritas
- Sto
- shareDnC