Brand Engineer

We're hiring a Brand Engineer: a brand designer who builds in code. You'll design and build the custom interactive tools that let client teams extend their visual identity on demand, and the Agentic Brand Systems that let people and AI tools build from the same source after handoff.

Why This Role Exists

A brand used to ship as a static guidelines PDF and a folder of design files. Now internal teams and AI agents make most of the day-to-day brand work after handoff, and they make it fast. Without a working system, agents guess in the gaps and busy teams drop the signature details. Over time the brand looks different in every channel.

At Little Plains, we replace the static handoff with a living product built around how brands get used.

Roughly eighty percent of every brand shares the same underlying anatomy: positioning, voice, audience rules, color, type, and layout. We package that foundation as an Agentic Brand System and deliver it through a web interface and an MCP server, so designers, marketers, and AI tools like Claude, Cursor, Figma, and Canva can generate on-brand landing pages, decks, and campaigns in one pass.

The remaining twenty percent is the signature idea: the visual device, art direction, or interactive motif that makes the brand unmistakable. Busy teams tend to drop it first. We protect it with custom browser tools built around the brand's signature moments, such as a generative diagram builder, a hero composer, a shader or texture generator, or an image treatment tool.

You'll design and build both. Every tool you make is part of the identity, built with the same care as the mark or the type system. Every system you ship is how a marketer or an agent ends up with work that looks, moves, and sounds like the brand.

About Little Plains

Little Plains is a brand and product studio working mostly with early-stage companies, from pre-launch through Series A. We partner with founders and small senior teams who are building new products and categories under real constraints.

We work as an embedded creative partner, building brand, product, and go-to-market work into systems that scale as companies grow. Our clients span healthcare, biotech, SaaS, and consumer products.

What You Will Do

Day to day, you will:

• Partner with our brand designers to turn a brand's signature visual ideas into interactive, browser-based tools that client teams can use without touching code
• Build tools tailored to each brand, such as a hero composer, a generative pattern or data-visualization tool, a type lockup builder, an image treatment editor, or a campaign asset generator
• Create motion, 3D, and shader-driven brand assets that respond to input
• Design the guardrails and controls inside each tool so teams have room to play without breaking the identity
• Treat the tool as a piece of brand expression: the interface, defaults, and output should all feel like the client's world
• Translate Figma files and strategy decks into structured, machine-readable kits covering visual variables, verbal rules, and reusable components
• Define visual variables and design tokens (type, color, spacing, grid, elevation, and motion) alongside the reasoning for when and how to use them
• Collaborate with strategists and copywriters so the verbal layer ships alongside the visual system: positioning, audience adjustments, words to avoid, and tone examples
• Encode the creative judgment an agent needs to apply the brand well: how expression dials up for a campaign or down for an enterprise deck, when to follow a rule, and what good looks like
• Deploy and maintain systems across our web front ends and MCP infrastructure, and connect them to the tools client teams already use (Claude, Cursor, Figma, Canva)
• Stress-test each system against client briefs, find where outputs drift, and fix the rule that caused it

How We Work

You'll work directly alongside our brand designers, strategists, copywriters, and design engineers, from early concepting through handoff. Everyone at Little Plains builds with AI tools daily, and we share new workflows, prototypes, and experiments across the team every week.

The Bar for Craft

You hold the tools and the system to the same standard as a flagship brand book. A custom tool should feel like the brand the moment someone opens it, and what it generates should sit comfortably next to work our senior designers made by hand.

We judge a brand system by what comes out of it. When a marketer or an agent runs a brief through it, the landing page, deck, or social campaign should look and sound like the brand in one pass. When an output feels generic, you trace it back and sharpen the input.

What We're Looking For

• Brand design foundation (2–5+ years or equivalent): a portfolio that shows identity craft across typography, color, layout, art direction, and motion, and explains why each design choice works
• Creative coding and interactive tools: live examples of interactive or generative tools you've designed and built, using Canvas, WebGL, shaders, p5.js, Three.js, GSAP, Rive, or similar
• Front-end fluency: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, and React, plus comfort with structured files (JSON, Markdown) and Git
• Figma-to-code translation: experience turning design systems and tokens into working code, and moving easily between design files and the browser
• AI-native workflow: daily use of coding and creative agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Flora, or similar) to prototype fast and ship production-ready tools
• Clear writing and speaking: you can write clear creative rules and walk designers, strategists, and non-technical clients through how a system works in plain English
• Bonus: experience with MCP servers, Figma or Canva plugins, Storybook, token pipelines like Style Dictionary, or headless CMS setups

What to Submit

• Resume or LinkedIn profile
• Portfolio featuring visual brand identity work
• Links to 1–3 brand tools, generative pieces, or interactive prototypes you've built (live links or short screen recordings)
• A few sentences on how you get an AI agent to produce on-brand work today, and where it still falls short

Thank You.

We appreciate your consideration and will review every submission carefully. Please allow a few business days for us to get back to you.

Cheers,
Little Plains