Design Engineer (Frontend + UI Craft), NextJs, ShadCN, Typescript [NO AGENCIES PLEASE]

No agencies please.. We are looking for a really strong design engineer. Not a frontend dev who waits for Figma files. Not a designer who hands off and disappears. Someone who lives in both worlds. You'll work with us on our main application, micro-interactions, dashboards. What "good" looks like for this role - You notice when a button has the wrong cursor style. You care if a hover state is 200ms vs 150ms. You've spent hours getting a gradient right. You know why Linear and Vercel and Stripe feel different from everything else, and you can articulate it. - You write clean React/Next.js/Tailwind. You know your way around shadcn, Framer Motion (or Motion), and modern CSS. You ship to production, not just prototypes. - You don't ship UI you don't love. You iterate. On AI tools - Use Cursor, Claude Code, v0, Figma MCP, whatever helps you ship faster. We're an AI company, we get it. But: no slop. We've seen the "AI-generated React component" look and we hate it. If you push code you didn't read, understand, and refine, this isn't for you. AI is a tool, not a substitute for thinking. What to send (please read this part) - Don't send a generic Upwork pitch. We'll skip it. Send: - Your best 2-3 shipped projects. Live links, not screenshots. Tell us what YOU specifically built (not the team). - A Loom (60-90 seconds) walking through one project you're proud of and one design decision you made and why. - One UI on the internet that you screenshotted recently and what you liked about it. - Your hourly rate and rough availability. Type the word sonic in your response somewhere. This is to make sure you read the post. Bonus points if - You've contributed to or built on top of shadcn, Aceternity, Magic UI, or similar libraries. You have a personal site that doesn't look like a template. You've shipped something with delightful micro-interactions that you can point to. Hard nos - WordPress portfolios. Template-y personal sites. "I can do React, Angular, Vue, Node, Django, PHP" generalists. Anyone who pastes the same proposal everywhere.