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Yesterday

Charge-Up Companion: An In-Car EV Charging Stop Planner

Design Engineer

L4 (Senior)

Automotive

Long road trips in electric vehicles can feel a little like a treasure hunt — drivers are always wondering, 'Will I make it to the next charger, and how long will I be stuck waiting?' Your team is building an in-dash feature that helps drivers plan and adjust charging stops on the fly, turning range anxiety into road-trip confidence. The goal is a calm, glanceable experience that does the math so drivers can keep their eyes on the road and their minds on the adventure ahead.

As the Design Engineer, you'll bridge design and code by prototyping a working, interaction-rich in-car module. You're responsible for the front-end behavior — component architecture, state transitions, and responsive layout logic for an automotive display — and for documenting how it hands off to the embedded engineering team. You won't define the routing algorithm itself, but you'll design how its outputs are surfaced and updated in real time.

Your Creative Challenges

What to Deliver

Friendly Boundaries

  • Keep it driver-friendly: assume the panel is viewed in quick glances, so favor large targets, minimal text, and clear hierarchy.
  • Design for a single landscape in-dash display (roughly 12–15 inches) — no need to support phones or multiple form factors.
  • Limit yourself to a focused MVP: one primary flow plus your two dynamic scenarios, no account or settings screens.
  • Animations should feel calm and purposeful — nothing flashy that could distract a driver mid-route.

Skills in Play

  • Front-end prototyping and component-based implementation
  • State management for real-time, data-driven interfaces
  • Automotive HMI interaction design and glanceability principles
  • Engineering handoff documentation and technical communication
  • Motion and micro-interaction design within performance constraints

What We’re Looking For: We'll look at how usable and glanceable your interface is in a driving context, the clarity and realism of your state model and engineering handoff, the smoothness and appropriateness of your interactions, how well your solution reduces range anxiety as a measurable user goal, and your attention to accessibility (contrast, target sizing, and reduced cognitive load). Bonus points for thoughtful trade-off reasoning between design polish and technical feasibility.

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