Design engineering is sold as the perfect evolution for designers: high demand, good pay, future-proof. But there is more to the job than making pretty interfaces.

Mehmet draws on real production experience to reveal what design engineering actually demands at senior levels: less creative design work and far more serious software engineering. Tech debt management, performance optimization, deployment pipelines, incident response, dependency management, and team politics. A rewarding career path, but one that can feel a lot like becoming an engineer.

This provocative, contrarian talk cuts through the hype to give designers an honest assessment before they make the jump. Attendees leave with a concrete breakdown of the non-glamorous tasks design engineers actually do, a realistic framework for evaluating whether the path is right for them, and a clear picture of other high-demand alternatives worth considering.