Lead Design Engineer

What you'll do

• Be the primary force behind the codebase with design support in Figma. Build, maintain, document, and evolve shared components, tokens, and patterns.
• Design highly interactive components and translate design specs into production-quality code with precise attention to spacing, color, typography, motion, and interaction behavior.
• Partner with product designers to close the gap between what’s in Figma and what ships. Attend crits, give feedback, and help think through edge cases or technical realities.
• Review designer PRs that touch shared UI surfaces and design system contributions from feature engineers.
• Move the accessibility of our product forward through direct contributions and as a resource to teams.
• Unblock product squads by providing flexible yet consistent components.
• Maintain and improve design system documentation for self-service.
• Contribute to evolving ways of working while maintaining system standards.

Must-haves

• 8+ years building products with both design and engineering experience.
• Portfolio, links to live projects, slide deck, or video walk-through demonstrating technical skill and design taste.
• Experience building or maintaining a product design system at production scale (tokens, component APIs, versioning, migration paths, documentation).
• High-polish front-end skills including motion.
• Fluent in Figma for creating designer resources.
• Clear communication across media.

Technical skills

• Making design systems accessible and easy to build with for designers, engineers, and agents.
• Building and maintaining production-quality components using modern React (hooks, composition patterns).
• Designing strongly-typed component APIs (replacing string props with proper named types).
• Proficiency with CSS modules, CSS custom properties (var(--semantic-token)), and using semantic tokens over primitives.
• Accessibility knowledge including keyboard navigation, focus management, screen reader behavior, ARIA labels.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience as a one-of-one or first-of-type in an organization.
• Design systems for complex products in creative tooling or similar.
• Using AI in design system workflows (agent skills, rules, automations).
• Building internal tools for designing, prototyping, and bringing specs to life.
• Familiarity with headless CMS tools, Electron apps, and related systems.

Compensation

Base salary range: $247,000 - $280,000. Final offers consider experience, expertise, location, and level.