UX Engineer Co-op

About HqO

HqO is connecting real estate to the people with an asset agnostic, cross-property suite of powerful applications and services that foster best-in-class, dynamic end-user experiences. HqO’s REX (Real Estate Experience) Platform assesses the health and performance of a person’s experience within a physical space while providing the necessary tools for operators to manage and optimize it, all from one central location. 

HqO has been trusted to power 400 million+ square feet across 700+ properties in 32 countries, and we’re backed by some of the world’s most prominent VC and real estate companies as we continue to grow rapidly across the world. 

We’re driven by our core values of LET’S GO (Learning, Excellence, Truth, Service, Goodness, Ownership) which define our culture and push us to do our best work every day. If you want to join a fast-growing, highly collaborative, and supportive team that is at the forefront of real estate transformation, we’re the company for you.

About the role

We're hiring a Summer 2026 UX Engineer Co-op to join our Product Development team in Boston, reporting to the Head of Product and Design and embedded day-to-day with Design and Engineering. This is a hands-on hybrid role at the seam between design and code — you'll spend your days in Claude Design, Claude Code, Linear, and our shared component library, helping us ship a more consistent, polished, and accessible REX Platform.

A UX Engineer at HqO is the person who keeps craft high in both prototypes and production. You'll own contributions to our shared component library, maintain the UI skills files that guide how Claude builds UI for us, build polished high-fidelity prototypes that product managers and customers can actually click through, pair with front-end engineers on production UI work, and run design QA so the product matches the spec — pixels, motion, and accessibility included.

This position is a hybrid role based in our Boston office, with a minimum of three days per week (Monday–Thursday) onsite. It is a full-time, paid summer co-op (approximately June–December 2026, flexible to your academic calendar).

Responsibilities – What You'll Do

You'll own a mix of component library work, prototype and production craft, design QA, and design automations. After a ramp-up period pairing with our designers and front-end engineers, you'll independently drive most of these deliverables, with support from Product, Design, and Engineering leadership.

• Own our shared component library. Build and maintain components in our shared design system (shared-packages, design tokens, Storybook stories), keep our Figma design system and the code library in lockstep, audit coverage and prune duplicates, and document usage so PMs, designers, and engineers can self-serve.
• Own our UI skills files. Maintain the Claude skills that guide how we build UI at HqO — component patterns, naming conventions, accessibility defaults, design system usage. Keep them accurate as the system evolves so every PM, designer, and engineer using Claude Code or Claude Design gets the same on-brand, on-spec output.
• Help build out our design automations. Partner with Product and Design on the AI-assisted workflows that connect design and code — design-to-code, token sync, design QA assistants, Claude-powered design ops. Tweak prompts, refine templates, and ship small automations that compound week over week.
• Help build polished, high-fidelity prototypes. Partner with PMs and Designers to turn early concepts into working prototypes — sometimes with real data, sometimes mocked — that can be put in front of customers and stakeholders. Use Claude Design, Claude Code, and our shared component library to move from idea to clickable in hours, not weeks.
• Ship polished production front-end work alongside engineers. Pick up well-scoped UI tickets in Linear — empty states, micro-interactions, form polish, responsive fixes, new component rollouts — and get them through code review and into the Monthly Release Train.
• Run design QA and accessibility audits. Sit between the design spec and the implemented UI on each release. Flag drift between spec and build, audit components against our accessibility standards (color contrast, keyboard navigation, ARIA, screen reader behavior), and partner with engineers on the fixes.
• Maintain Appcues and HelpHub documentation. Keep our in-app guidance (Appcues flows, tooltips, onboarding) and our customer-facing help content (HelpHub articles, screenshots, navigation) accurate and on-brand as features ship. Update what's stale, write new entries when a release lands, and make sure the UI, the in-app guidance, and the docs all tell the same story.
• Partner with PMs on early-stage exploration. Sit in on discovery sessions, build quick coded explorations alongside design concepts, and help PMs and designers pressure-test ideas before they hit a sprint.
• Cross-functional coordination. Serve as connective tissue between Design and Engineering — surfacing tradeoffs early, raising "this won't build cleanly" or "this design assumption breaks at mobile width" before tickets are sized, and helping designers and engineers speak the same vocabulary.
• Document patterns and contribute to internal craft. Write short component or pattern docs as you build, contribute to our internal UX and front-end best practices, and share learnings back with the broader team.

Qualifications – What You’ll Bring 
We're looking for a current undergraduate student (rising junior or senior) in a co-op or internship program — ideally pursuing a degree in Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, Interaction Design, Information Science, Design + Engineering, Cognitive Science, or a related field. We care more about craft and aptitude than a specific major.

• A real interest in both sides of the line. You like design, and you like writing code. You've probably already built things on your own — a portfolio site, a side project, a class app — where you owned both how it looks and how it works.
• Working knowledge of modern front-end fundamentals. Comfort with HTML, CSS (including a utility framework like Tailwind, or modern CSS-in-JS / CSS modules), and JavaScript/TypeScript. Some exposure to React is expected; you don't need to be an expert, but you should be able to read a component and make meaningful changes to it. Familiarity with shadcn/ui (or a similar headless / composable component library) is a plus.
• Design system fluency. You're comfortable reading a design spec and translating it into components, whether the spec lives in a design tool, a screenshot, or a Loom. Bonus points if you've worked with design tokens or contributed to a shared component library before.
• An eye for craft. You notice the four-pixel misalignment. You care about the empty state. You can articulate why one micro-interaction feels right and another feels off.
• Clear, professional written communication. You can write a tight PR description, a clean component doc, or a short Loom-style walkthrough of a prototype. You write the way a teammate would want to read.
• Curiosity about how product teams work. You don't need prior product experience, but you should be genuinely interested in how software gets designed, built, and shipped — and willing to learn the rhythms of sprints, release trains, and design reviews.
• Comfort working with AI tools. Much of our day-to-day runs on Claude Design, Claude Code, and other AI-assisted tooling. We'll teach you what you need to know; we just need you to be open to working this way.

Nice to Have

• A public portfolio, GitHub, CodePen, or personal site that shows your work
• Prior internship or co-op experience in a software, design, or design-systems environment
• Experience contributing to a design system, component library, or Storybook
• Familiarity with accessibility standards (WCAG, ARIA, keyboard navigation)
• Exposure to Linear or similar tools
• Previous experience with Agile / Scrum concepts (sprints, story points, cycles)

Why this role is a great opportunity

Most design or front-end internships put you in one lane — you're either making things in a design tool or shipping tickets, rarely both. This role lives in the middle on purpose. Over six months you'll own pieces of the shared component library that every product team at HqO depends on, ship UI that customers use in real buildings around the world, and shape the AI tooling that the whole company designs and builds with. You'll leave with a portfolio of components, prototypes, automations, and shipped work you can point to by name. If you're considering a future career as a UX engineer, design engineer, front-end engineer, or product designer who codes, this is a rare chance to do the actual job — not shadow it — inside a venture-backed software company.

Pay 

The hourly compensation range reflects HqO’s reasonable, good-faith estimate of what the company expects to pay for this role at the time of posting.

Range: 

• 1st Year Internship: $26/hour
• 2nd Year Internship: $30/hour

How to apply

For consideration, please submit your resume.  We appreciate your interest in HqO and will be back in touch if it seems like your background and experience are a good fit!

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