So, I have actually tried to hire for this role. Multiple times.
The reality is that I got an order of magnitude fewer applications of an order of magnitude lower quality when I've tried to describe this role, as compared to when I just put the standardized "front end engineer" title in the role.
So instead I tried to just sift through the "front end engineer" applicants to find people with design sensibilities. But this also yielded poor results. After reviewing at least a thousand applicants, I found one or two people with this combination of skillsets, and one of them to whom I made an offer ended up going with a different firm.
Senior engineers in our team said things like "I think you're searching for a unicorn that doesn't exist" and "people just don't mix the right-brained and left-brained skills."
After trying so hard, I just accepted that and decided to work with dedicated designers and dedicated engineers. Each are good at what they do.
But our web experience is definitely lacking for lack of someone in this role. Right now, this week, I'm trying to fill the gap as I can do a little bit of both. Everyone on our team feels like we need some "glue" to tie our experiences together well. But a designer can't make it happen and a pure engineer can't imagine what to do without very explicit detailed designs / instructions. It's so much more effective for one person to at once understand how the code needs to function, what helps the user, and have design sensibility to make the form 'function' w/r/t cognitive overload and intuition. Things get lost in communication without someone who can understand all three. But there's no one I feel I can truly delegate this to completely on our product team.
What have the experiences been of other people who have hired and built product teams?