Staff Design Engineer

Own Stylus. The roadmap, triage, and the call on what goes in, measured against numbers we actually track: component adoption, accessibility coverage, and documentation health, plus the design system survey we run every 6–12 months. You'll set direction while absorbing requests from engineers and designers.

Build the hard components. The ones where aesthetics and performance fight each other. You'll decide what becomes a shared primitive and what stays a one-off, and build both.

Prototype in code and validate with customers. Build interactive prototypes in React and TypeScript for the explorations that are faster in code than in Figma: animation, keyboard, touch. Then test them with real users.

Work with designers without a handoff. A designer starts a direction, you iterate together in Figma or directly in code, and you're the person who can say what a given interaction will cost to build.

Keep design and code from drifting apart. Tokens aligned with design, legacy components actively migrated onto the system instead of left alone, and Figma-to-code tooling that stays useful.

Make the system work for agents as well as people. Explore emerging UX patterns and AI-ready design languages, and build the primitives we'll need as more of our UI gets assembled by models.

Share how you work. Document the prompts, patterns, and workflows you use in Cursor and Claude Code and share them with designers and engineers. Mentor engineers on design principles.

We hire people who set their own agenda, so treat this as the shape of the first quarter rather than a checklist handed to you.

Land your first Stylus change in the first week or two - small, real, in production. You'll learn more about our stack from one merged component fix than from a month of onboarding docs.

Build the honest picture: where components have drifted, which surfaces are furthest from the system, and what our accessibility coverage actually is versus what we assume it is.

Meet the people who file the requests - designers, product engineers, marketing - and watch customers use the product. Craft decisions get better when the person making them has watched someone struggle.

Publish the Stylus roadmap and the quality bar that goes with it, and start using both to say no. This is the point where a backlog becomes a plan with an owner.

Pick the first hard component and build it - the one where aesthetics and performance fight each other, that nobody has had the time to do properly.

Start the legacy migration where it pays off most, and make the path off legacy obvious enough that other engineers take it without being asked.

Get adoption, accessibility, and documentation health reported automatically, so system health is a number we see rather than a question we ask.

Make contributing to Stylus something engineers and designers actually do: a clear way in for requests, contributions, and exceptions, with you making the call on each.

Ship the first AI workflows you'd want the rest of us using - the prompts, skills, and tooling that let designers and PMs build against the system safely.

By six months: Stylus has a real roadmap instead of a backlog, the legacy-component migration is actively moving, and adoption is reported automatically rather than asked about.

8+ years of experience in front-end development with a strong design sensibility and real depth in CSS, the DOM, and browser rendering. You have a view on when to use native platform elements versus a framework's version, and you can explain it.

Design ability of your own. You can make the call on an interaction, and you know which ones aren't worth what they cost to build.

You've worked on a design system at depth: components, primitives, tokens, versioning, adoption, and the governance to hold a line when a team wants an exception.

You shape the work rather than take tickets. You'll be accountable for a roadmap, which means knowing when to say no.

You already build with AI tools like Cursor and Claude Code, and you like getting other people using them well.

Accessibility, keyboard and touch input, and respecting user preferences are things you handle by default.

If you're reading this thinking "that's me!", we want to meet you.

Our loop is a code-and-craft exercise, not a portfolio review.

Figma plugins, automations, or CI checks that report design system adoption and accessibility

Web components or multi-framework experience, including shipping a system into non-React surfaces

Desktop apps or browser extensions, especially always-on ones

Agent-facing or generative UI work