Design engineer (US)

WRITER•New York, NY

2d•$129,000 - $234,000•Hybrid

About The Position

WRITER is hiring a Design Engineer to own the Writer Design System (WDS), including how it is built, maintained, and used by people and AI agents. The role will ensure WRITER’s core UI library is complete, consistent, and trustworthy as AI coding agents increasingly build production code against it. The Design Engineer will shape product surfaces and help establish standards and processes for how the EPD organization ships product. This hybrid role is based out of WRITER hubs in San Francisco, Chicago, Austin, New York City, Seattle, or London, and reports to the Director of Product Design. WRITER is open to hiring at multiple levels, with compensation scaled to experience, expertise, and role scope.

Requirements

4–8+ years building production frontends with TypeScript and React, with experience owning a system, platform, or surface end-to-end.
Strong instincts for animation principles, including easing curves, choreography, anticipation, follow-through, interruptibility, and perceived performance.
Expert fluency in Figma, including auto-layout, variants, variables, and code connect.
Proficiency with design engineering technologies such as framer-motion, gsap, and lottie for web-based animation.
A portfolio, side projects, GitHub work, or production work demonstrating strong craft and systems-level work, not just feature work.
Experience driving adoption of a design system or shared platform across an engineering organization and influencing technical or design direction beyond an immediate team.
Experience with AI product surfaces, including tool-call UIs, streaming responses, agent state, and dynamic UI rendering.
Comfort navigating ambiguous, cross-team problems and using good judgment about when to involve others.
Genuine commitment to WRITER’s values of Connect, Challenge, and Own.

Responsibilities

Own, agentify, and maintain the Writer Design System (WDS), ensuring it works well for both people and AI agents.
Design and build production-quality UI components and features, owning work from sketch through launch.
Ship design-led improvements, including polish passes, micro-interactions, and brand moments.
Architect new primitives and extend core system components while keeping documentation, examples, and libraries in sync across Figma, .md skills, and Storybook.
Uphold front-end craft standards for accessibility, motion, consistency, and quality, ensuring accessibility is built into every design system component.
Shape the design-to-code workflow by researching tools and practices that improve productivity and democratize workflows across the EPD organization.
Partner with designers, product managers, and engineering leads to measure WDS adoption, close gaps, and ensure shipped features meet design system standards.

Benefits

Generous paid time off and company holidays.
Medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and their families.
16 weeks of paid parental leave for all parents.
Fertility and family planning support.
Early-detection cancer testing through Galleri.
Flexible spending account and dependent FSA options.
Health savings account for eligible plans, with a company contribution.
Annual wellness stipend for expenses such as gym, massage or chiropractic care, and personal training.
Annual learning and development stipend.
Company-wide and team off-sites.
Competitive compensation, company stock options, and a 401(k).