Restate (restate.dev) is a lightweight runtime that turns AI agents, workflows, and backend services into durable processes - so teams can focus on their logic, not failure mechanics.
The role: We’re looking for a Founding Brand Designer to help shape the Restate brand. Your work will be decisive in ensuring Restate becomes one of the most influential products in the AI infrastructure space. You’ll shape our visual language that informs brand identity.
You’ll ensure consistency of the visual identity across platforms and will design key pieces like the website and other marketing surfaces.
The opportunity
Front-row seat to the biggest infra shift in decades
Durable runtimes like Restate are becoming the next foundational infrastructure component - and increasingly a critical piece for AI applications. As systems become more agentic, long-running, integration-heavy, and failure-prone, durable execution turns reliability from a bespoke engineering tax into a default property. In this role, you’re not watching that shift from the sidelines - you help build the platform that enables it.
State-of-the-art tech, built from first principles
Restate re-imagines durable execution as a lightweight self-contained stack - no database required - and ships as a single Rust binary with an optimized custom storage layer, low latency orchestration, and an analytics engine for observability.
Enterprise Traction
Restate is already used by Fortune 500 companies, including Tier 1 banks running critical financial workflows, and also by cutting-edge AI and infra startups pushing the boundary of what “production-grade agents” mean. You’ll work on problems where reliability, correctness, and operational simplicity are existential.
Work with world-class engineers
You’ll partner directly with engineers who’ve built and operated foundational systems at scale - creators of Apache Flink, and leaders from Meta’s messaging infrastructure. You’ll have the chance to work with incredibly talented individuals who care deeply about their craft.
What you’ll do
This is a Founding Designer role spanning the full Restate brand and developer-facing surface area. The scope includes but is not limited to:
Evolve the Restate brand: shape a visual identity that ensures Restate is one of the most beloved products in the AI infrastructure space, used by some of the most prominent AI companies.
Own restate.dev: ensure the Restate brand is correctly reflected on our website to developers, potential customers, and prospective hires.
Bring durable execution to life visually: leverage interactive and animated explanations of Restate’s architecture to explain key differentiators.
Motion as a first-class medium: Restate is a living, durable system. We intend to design with motion to convey that.
Build scalable design systems: reusable components and patterns for architecture diagrams, code visualizations, and interactive elements that others can benefit from.
Ship across surfaces: developer-facing content, blog illustrations, social visuals, conference and event materials, sales decks.
What we’re looking for
Founding profile
We’re looking for a designer with strong opinions and a portfolio that backs them up. You should be comfortable operating with significant autonomy, working directly with founders and the founding team, and pushing back when the team is wrong.
Must-haves:
A portfolio that demonstrates brand systems thinking. We want to see how you’ve defined visual languages that scale.
Motion design ability: motion as a way to communicate state, time, and dynamism.
Visual storytelling for technical concepts. Show us how you’ve made something complex feel obvious.
Strong website craft. You can take a website from concept through to shipped design and prototype.
AI literacy: you’re using AI to multiply your own impact and to unblock yourself. You’re not waiting for engineers to help you take a new website version live.
Nice-to-haves:
Prior work on developer tools, infrastructure, or AI products. Familiarity with the developer audience and what “great” looks like in this space.
You think in transitions, state, and interaction, not just static screens. You’re comfortable using tools like Rive, After Effects, Lottie, or equivalent to bring concepts to life.
Front-end fluency (HTML/CSS/JS) so you can prototype interactive concepts yourself.
Experience building or contributing to a design system in production.
Not a fit:
You want to lead a design team rather than be the senior IC doing the work yourself.
You expect heavy direction. We need someone who arrives with a point of view and can evolve the brand.
You’re not interested in technical subject matter. Our surface area is wide, and the role lives or dies on translating it.
Engagement, location, and travel
Engagement: we expect this to start as a paid 50% contract engagement with a clear path to full-time.
Location: remote in Europe
Travel: minimal; occasional team offsites.