Staff Design Engineer

Please note: This role is in-office in San Francisco at our headquarters working with the entire company five days per week. We are not open to remote candidates.

About Us

Campfire builds modern ERP software for finance teams — bringing accounting, close, and reporting workflows into one fast, intuitive system. We're a small, senior team obsessed with craft, speed, and making complex financial software feel simple to use.

About the Role🌟

We're looking for a Staff Design Engineer to help shape the core experience of Campfire's ERP platform. You'll take on our thorniest, highest-leverage design problems — the ones that touch multiple teams, span complex workflows, and require deep systems thinking. This is a senior individual-contributor role: you'll set design direction, raise the bar for craft across the team, and partner directly with engineering and product leadership to ship work that materially changes how finance teams operate.

You'll have significant ownership over ambiguous, cross-cutting problems (think: reimagining the general ledger experience, or designing a coherent system for how data flows between modules) rather than a single feature area.

💼 We Need Someone Who

Own end-to-end design for complex, ambiguous problem spaces spanning multiple product areas — from framing the problem to shipping and iterating post-launch

Partner with product and engineering leads as a peer, shaping roadmap and strategy, not just executing against a spec

Design for dense, data-heavy workflows (tables, ledgers, reconciliation, reporting) in a way that stays clear and fast to use

Strengthen and evolve Campfire's design system and interaction patterns so the product feels coherent as it grows

Mentor other designers, give sharp critique, and raise the craft bar across the team

Talk directly to customers — finance and accounting teams — to ground design decisions in how they actually work

Drive design reviews and help the team make faster, better-informed decisions

👥 Ideal Candidate

8+ years of product design experience, with a track record of owning complex, high-impact product areas end to end

Experience designing for data-dense, workflow-heavy software (fintech, ERP, dev tools, B2B SaaS, or similar) is a strong plus

Strong systems thinking — you can zoom out to see how a feature fits the broader product, and zoom in on pixel-level details

A portfolio that shows range: 0-to-1 work, and rigorous iteration on existing systems

Excellent communication skills; you can build alignment with engineers, PMs, and executives, and explain design rationale clearly

Comfort working in ambiguity, with incomplete requirements, and evolving your own scope

Prior experience at an early- or growth-stage startup, with a bias toward shipping over perfecting in isolation

Able to code your own prototypes (HTML/CSS and enough JavaScript to build interactive, functional mockups)

📢 Let's Connect

Think you're the perfect fit? We're excited to meet you! Reach out, share your story, and let's explore how you can ignite change at Campfire.

❤️‍🩹 Benefits

We provide top decile benefits including 100% premium coverage for employees and 80% coverage for dependents with comprehensive healthcare and dental care options.