UI/UX Designer Who Codes (React + Tailwind)

We run a mid-term rental company — 124 furnished units, mostly 3–4 month stays, booked directly through our own website and through Airbnb. Everything we run on is custom: our own booking site, our own CMS, and an internal operations platform we're building now to replace the fifteen spreadsheets our team currently lives in. We're bringing on our first dedicated designer. Everything we build is our own product, and we want one person who owns the interface end to end rather than a design that changes shape every time it gets handed off. The role You are our design team. Day to day that means UI work — improving what's already live, designing new pages and features, and building them. You'll work directly with me and with our developers, with nobody in between. This is the part most designers skip and the part we care about most: we don't want mockups thrown over a wall. We want someone who designs a screen, builds it, sees it in the browser, and fixes what doesn't feel right. If you've ever been frustrated watching a developer ship a worse version of your design, this is the job where that stops happening. We also want a thinker, not a pixel pusher. Half of what we need isn't "make this prettier," it's "why are guests dropping off at this step" and "what should this flow actually look like." Bring opinions. We'll listen to them. What you'll actually work on Ongoing improvements to our public booking website — landing pages, unit listing pages, the inquiry and checkout flow New feature design for our internal operations dashboard: a reservations calendar across 100+ units, a payments and installments view, a CRM pipeline, task boards for cleaning and maintenance Turning rough ideas and screenshots into designed, working screens Building a real design system for us — components, type scale, spacing, states — so we stop reinventing buttons Reviewing the flows we already have and telling us what's broken about them What we need from you Strong visual design. Your portfolio should make us want to hire you before we read a word. You write front-end code: React / Next.js and Tailwind, plus solid plain HTML/CSS/JavaScript. You don't need to be a backend engineer — you need to ship your own UI without waiting on someone. Real UX judgment. You can explain why a flow is laid out the way it is, not just how it looks. Comfortable in Figma, but comfortable leaving it when code is the faster path. Responsive and accessible work by default. Our guests book on phones. Clear written English and a habit of communicating without being chased. At least 4 hours of daily overlap with US Eastern time. Nice to have Experience with booking, travel, real estate, or marketplace products Motion and interaction design Design systems experience at a company that actually maintained one Familiarity with Supabase, headless CMS setups, or Stripe checkout flows An eye for marketing design — landing pages, email, social — even if it isn't your main thing How to apply Skip the template. We can spot one instantly and we won't read past the first line. Send us: Your portfolio. Point us at the two or three pieces you're proudest of, and tell us what you did on each — not what the team did. One thing you'd change about a booking or rental website you've used recently, and why. Two or three sentences is plenty. We're reading for how you think, not how much you write. A link to something you designed AND built, if you have one. GitHub, a live site, a CodePen — anything we can look at and confirm the code is yours. Start your reply with the word "furnished" so we know you read this.