Design Engineer — xGrid

You will design and implement a great user and developer experience for the MUI X Data Grid.

Details of the role

Location: Remote (strong preference for UTC-6 to UTC+5).
Type of work: Full-time (contractor or employee depending on circumstances).
Level: IC4 or above.
We're a remote company, we prefer asynchronous communication over meetings.

MUI's story began in 2014 with Material UI, the most successful React implementation of Google's Material Design. Today, Material UI stands as one of the most popular open-source libraries on GitHub and has paved the way for the fully-fledged startup known as MUI (founded in 2019), which now boasts an ever-expanding ecosystem of React UI products. We're a company of 31+ people as of late 2023, and we're growing.

The products

MUI is best known for our flagship product, Material UI—but this is just one of three core component libraries we maintain. Base UI is our headless component library, and Joy UI is a sister library to Material UI that implements our own in-house Joy Design system. We also host Design Kits and pre-built Templates.

Beyond the core libraries, MUI X offers advanced components like the Data Grid, Date and Time Pickers, and Charts, for more complex user interactions and data visualization needs.

We're also making ambitious moves to incorporate our full suite of components into Toolpad, a low-code admin builder tool for assembling full-stack apps faster than ever.

Learn more about MUI's products in this blog post: An introduction to the MUI ecosystem.

The culture

MUI is a fully remote company with a team that spans the globe. The majority of our work is asynchronous, and we rely on written communication to collaborate. We're radically transparent: nearly all of our work happens in public. Each contributor has the freedom to decide how and when they work, and that work is primarily self-directed: it's your responsibility to define and complete your own tasks in a timely manner.

For additional details about the culture, you can check our careers and about pages and also our public Handbook.

Why we're hiring

According to our last survey, the quality of the design execution (UX & UI) is the most important criterion used by developers & designers to choose a component UI library.

It's an even bigger problem when developers work on projects around a single major component, like the Data Grid. It's not just the interaction that needs to feel great but the developer experience of working with that component also needs to be excellent, to allow a smooth integration with the rest of their app.

Up until now, we're solving a subset of these problems by smoothly integrating the MUI X Data Grid with Material UI. But the time has come to take a step further and double down on design by expanding the Data Grid capacities to integrate nicely with any React project rather than just a Material UI-based one.

Overall, both our open-source community and our premium products are growing fast (x2 YoY). We need talented people to keep that going!

Why this is interesting

Developing and designing components for advanced use cases is not an easy feat. It's an intricate challenge to craft customizable, feature-rich, and performative components while having them look great out of the box.

Within the MUI X team, you'll be facing this challenge head-on! We want to serve demanding customers by making their experience building data-heavy and complex applications much smoother with reliable, advanced React components.

There aren't a lot of benchmarks out there. So, by combining top-notch engineering with sleek product design, you'll be pioneering a whole different area of UI component development.

The role

What you'll do on a day-to-day basis

The Design Engineer role sits right at the intersection between product design and software engineering. So, depending on the initiative, your day can be entirely different! Here's what you'll be able to do:

Contribute to feature releases and deep refactors. MUI X is a complex codebase. Components we've shipped recently, such as the Data Grid and Date and Time Pickers, require months of dedicated, careful work.
Design for engineers and their end users. As an engineer yourself, you can understand the problems developers face, and you will help them overcome those problems by delivering amazing DX and enabling them to create powerful UX for their end users. This might involve careful API design, identifying and fixing top bugs, creating easy-to-understand error messages, and writing documentation and blog posts about features you and your team ship.
Collaborate with the open-source community. The community contributes with many meaningful features and fixes. You'll guide and support them helping MUI X's growth while inspiring many others to join the ride, too.
Experiment and play. Great, unexpected features and heisenbug fixes have come from a number of sources — relentlessly methodical processes of elimination, free-flowing team collaboration, inspiration from adjacent libraries and projects, and difficult-to-explain individual strokes of brilliance. Whatever your preferred style is for creating new things that others might not have thought of, you'll find a welcome home on the team.
Take ownership of features from idea/mockup to live deployment. You'll shape and guide the direction of crucial new features, including new components.
You'll be interacting with customers regularly, handling inbound support and feature requests (every developer helps with developer requests).
Bridge the gap between design and engineering. Sometimes, you'll be sketching new features on Figma. On other days, you'll be prototyping them in code.

Challenges you'll face

Context switching. As a small team, sometimes priorities shift fast, requiring you to dive into an entirely different feature you're unfamiliar with. It's challenging to get used to but rewarding.
Moving fast without sacrificing quality. Given our product is essentially code, our users and customers are incredibly demanding. To serve them the best way possible, we need to ship incredibly high-quality code quickly. However, sometimes we need to exchange going 100% into solving an issue, to instead aim for 50 to 70%, for a faster feedback cycle.
Open-source: The nonstop stream of bug reports and support requests. You'll frequently have your attention challenged given community requests keep pouring in. It will require you to develop an intuition for when to ignore something for later vs. when to dig in immediately as it could be a valuable improvement opportunity.

Who we're looking for

Required

3+ years of web front-end development at product-driven companies
Advanced knowledge of modern React, HTML, and CSS
Great understanding and taste in product design
Experience with design systems
You're highly empathetic
Strong written and verbal communication skills

Nice to have (but not required)

Experience in open-source
Experience with MUI products

Benefits and compensation

Competitive compensation depending on the profile and location. We are ready to pay top market rates for a person that can clearly exceed the role's expectations. You can find the other perks & benefits on the careers page.

How to apply

Apply now for this position 📮

Don't meet every requirement? Apply anyway! Research shows that certain folks are less likely to apply for a role than others unless they meet 100% of the outlined qualifications. If this role excites you, we want to hear from you. We'd love for you to share the unique skills, passion, and experience you could bring to MUI.