Design Developer

What you'll do

• Collaborate on the existing system. Assess its state, establish direction with other contributors, and close the gap between design specs and implementation.
• Build and ship components and tokens yourself, while evolving contribution standards with the broader community of designers and engineers who maintain the system alongside you.
• Develop and evangelize a point of view on AI-assisted UI development. Experiment with tooling, workflows, and system structures that make AI a reliable collaborator for anyone writing UI code: engineers, designers, and PMs.
• Build and maintain the AI tooling layer for UI: Claude skills, Cursor rules, LLM-consumable documentation, or whatever meaningfully improves the quality and velocity of coding UI.
• Partner with designers, engineers, and accessibility to improve the quality of user experience created by everyone working with the system—through advocacy, better documentation, clearer patterns, and tooling that makes the right thing the easy thing.

Who you are

• Your design craft is strong. You produce work you're proud of and can articulate why it's good. You hold design systems to a high bar, both in their visual expression and their technical implementation.
• You're energized by both sides of the role. You move between design and code without treating one as a means to the other. You have a portfolio that shows both polished design work in application and production-quality libraries.
• You are actively curious about AI-assisted development. You've already experimented with LLM-driven tooling, Claude skills, codegen, or similar workflows, and you have opinions about where it's heading.
• You are able to prioritize a path forward. You have strong instincts on sequencing and know what to fix now, what to document and defer, and what to let go.
• You raise the bar around you. The best version of this role doesn't just improve the system—it improves how everyone at Airtable builds UI. You're motivated by that multiplier effect.

What we're looking for

• 8+ years at the intersection of design and engineering, with experience inheriting and evolving systems.
• Deep fluency in design tokens, component architecture, theming, and accessibility standards (WCAG).
• Ability to influence through craft, clarity, and relationships.