Design Engineer – Canada Only Full Time

About OTB

OTB is a small Calgary-based digital studio. We build marketing sites and product surfaces for companies like 7shifts, Quipli, Ethica Coffee Roasters, Redpoint Media, and Urban Forge. We’re founder-led, fast-moving, and we obsess over the details — the kind of details most agencies skip when the deadline gets tight.

The team is intentionally small. That means the work you ship goes live, not into a backlog. It also means you’ll talk directly to our founders, our designers, and the marketing leads at our clients — no PMs in the middle, no telephone game.

What the role is

This is a Design Engineer role. Not a Full Stack one.

We’re hiring someone who lights up at the thought of nailing a hero animation, getting a homepage to load under 800ms on a slow connection, and building marketing pages that actually convert. You’ll spend the bulk of your week in TypeScript, Next.js, CSS, motion, and a headless CMS. You won’t be wiring up Postgres schemas, building admin dashboards, or arguing about microservices.

If you’ve ever screenshotted a marketing site and saved it to a “look at this” folder — this role is for you.

What you’ll actually do

• Build marketing sites and landing pages for OTB clients across SaaS, consumer, and ecommerce
• Translate Figma into production code that matches the design at every breakpoint, in every state, on every device
• Author motion and micro-interactions that make sites feel alive — Framer Motion, GSAP, CSS, scroll-driven, the works
• Hit hard performance budgets: Core Web Vitals, sub-second LCP, WCAG AA minimum, no compromises
• Partner with marketing leads to translate positioning and narrative into pages that move the numbers — conversion is part of the craft, not a separate concern
• Ship CRO experiments — exit-intent flows, A/B tests, pricing layout iterations — and watch the funnel respond
• Own marketing site implementation end-to-end inside whatever headless CMS the client uses
• Contribute opinions on copy hierarchy, page pacing, and information architecture — not just CSS

You’re a strong fit if…

• You have 3–5 years building production marketing sites or polished product surfaces with React-based meta-frameworks (Next.js preferred)
• You have strong opinions about CSS and could open dev tools on a site right now and explain why something feels off
• You can build complex motion sequences that don’t jank, don’t trap focus, and respect prefers-reduced-motion
• You’ve worked with at least one headless CMS in production (Sanity, Contentful, Storyblok, Payload — any flavor)
• You care about the gap between design and shipped code being zero pixels
• You think about marketing sites as products — with users, funnels, and conversion goals — not as brochures
• You read CSS Tricks, Josh Comeau, the Vercel blog, the Linear blog, or sites like Godly.website for fun

You’re probably not a fit if…

• Your portfolio is mostly dashboards, admin panels, or internal apps
• You’d rather be writing API endpoints than fine-tuning an easing curve
• “Pixel-perfect” sounds like a stylistic preference to you rather than a baseline expectation
• “Marketing sites” sounds beneath your skill level

We’d genuinely rather you self-select out than spend a round of interviews finding this out.

The stack

• TypeScript — non-negotiable
• Next.js — App Router, RSC fluency expected
• Tailwind for most things, vanilla CSS for the harder stuff
• Framer Motion / GSAP — pick your weapon, but you should have one
• Headless CMS — we work with whatever the client needs (Sanity, Contentful, Storyblok, Payload)
• Shopify — Liquid and Hydrogen for our ecommerce clients (a plus, not required)
• Vercel — our primary hosting target

Logistics

• Remote within Canada — work from wherever
• Full-time, salaried — CA$70,000–90,000 based on experience and portfolio strength
• Calgary HQ — occasional in-person team gatherings if you can make them

How to apply

Send us three things:

1. Your resume or LinkedIn.
2. A portfolio link — with at least 2–3 marketing sites you’ve shipped (live URLs preferred). Personal blogs and dashboards don’t count for this role. If a project is under NDA, screen recordings or annotated before/afters work.
3. A short answer to this:
4. Send us a marketing site you think is exceptional — yours or someone else’s — and explain in 2–3 paragraphs what makes it great from a craft perspective. Be specific. We’re more interested in your taste than your resume.
5. Applications without a portfolio or without the question answered won’t be reviewed. We’re optimizing for signal, not volume.

OTB is an equal opportunity employer. We hire on craft, judgment, and taste — and we welcome applications from anyone who brings those.