Maybe I am a Design Engineer

Reading Maggie Appleton’s take on the role felt weirdly familiar. The Design Engineer is a rare hybrid position; one that thrives in consultancy, or in roles like solution architecture. And after a lot of personal and professional detours, this is one of the first titles that actually feels like it fits.

I’m not a deep in the weeds, core-code kind of engineer, neither am I deep in design nerd. I am comfortable with Creative Cloud, Figma, Whimsical, a couple design tools, and can wire-frame / prototype quite well. I also enjoy spending a great amount of my time in an IDE. Over my career, I’ve built serious proficiency with PHP (Yii Framework, CodeIgniter), which I used to develop the entire CRM for Tecmie. Then I moved into fancy land: did a Ruby on Rails bootcamp, picked up Node.js and TypeScript, and joined the open-source language Imba as an early contributor. (Imba is a JavaScript VM with the syntactic sugar of Ruby. After that came Python, Solidity, Rust (for Attest Protocol), and every other meta framework or language necessary for building on the edge AI, blockchain, the works.

Even though I can pick up complex systems fast, I don’t chase new languages or paradigms just for fun. I only dig into them when the current project demands it. When my existing toolset hits a wall, or in rare cases, when one of the engineers working on a critical project fucks up our timelines.

In other words, I learn in context. Problem-first. Design-next, which gives me a rare gift.

Transforming Value Propositions into Delightful Software.

So maybe, yes, I’m not a PM, EM, SWE, or a Product Designer. But all of my capabilities intersect those functions. And for the first time, I think the role definition that perfectly captures my abilities might be this one:

Design Engineer.