# Lead Design Engineer

**Company:** [Descript](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/descript)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Fullstack Engineering
**Salary:** $247k – $280k/yr
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** React, Figma, Css Modules, Css Custom Properties, Semantic Tokens, Aria, Accessibility, Design Systems, Motion Design, TypeScript
**Posted:** 2026-06-29

> Lead Design Engineer building and evolving a production design system for Descript's AI-powered video editor. Translate Figma designs to high-polish React components, mentor hybrid designers, advance accessibility, and bridge design-engineering gaps. Requires 8+ years combined design/engineering experience and a portfolio.

## Job Description

## 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.

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**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/eba12cde-6402-4a80-b691-80aa39443359
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/eba12cde-6402-4a80-b691-80aa39443359