Design Engineer

Assembled • San Francisco, CA

13d • $150,000 - $215,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Assembled is seeking a Design Engineer to lead the development of its design system. This role involves defining the visual and interaction foundations of the product, creating components, patterns, and a design language to ensure cohesive, accessible, and high-quality user experiences across desktop and mobile. The position also focuses on establishing how the design system evolves, including documentation, contribution models, and governance. A key aspect of this role is defining reusable interaction patterns for AI-native products, guiding how users interact with, trust, and collaborate with AI agents. Additionally, the Design Engineer will pioneer AI-assisted design-system workflows in collaboration with the Design Systems Engineer, utilizing coding agents to generate UI, understand component usage, measure adherence, and streamline the design-to-implementation process. The role requires partnering with product teams to address complex workflows and translate solutions into reusable patterns, ultimately elevating the entire platform. This is an onsite position based in the San Francisco office, requiring a five-day work week (Monday–Friday).

Requirements

• 4+ years designing and shipping production B2B software, with meaningful ownership of a design system used across multiple teams or products.
• Exceptional visual craft with a high standard for quality.
• Strong systems thinking, with an ability to think in primitives and reusable patterns, and a drive for consistent implementation across a product.
• Hands-on experience structuring Figma libraries, tokens, variables, components, and documentation for multi-team use.
• Understanding of how design systems reach production, with the ability to collaborate fluently with frontend engineers on component APIs, responsive behavior, accessibility, states, and implementation tradeoffs.
• Ability to enable other designers by creating approachable systems, clearly explaining decisions, and helping teams apply patterns without becoming a bottleneck.
• Ability to move quickly, with a bias toward shipping, comfort with ambiguity, and preference for real user feedback over isolation.
• Excitement about AI-native design workflows and the role of design systems in accelerating development by both people and agents.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to collaborate closely with engineering and bring designers, engineers, and leadership along with their thinking.

Nice To Haves

• Experience using coding or design agents (e.g., Cursor, Claude, Figma AI) to build, prototype, or ship.
• Experience instrumenting or measuring design-system adoption/adherence, or running large-scale component migrations.

Responsibilities

• Lead the next generation of Assembled's design system, defining visual language, interaction foundations, components, and patterns for cohesive, accessible, high-quality experiences across desktop and mobile.
• Establish how the system evolves through documentation, contribution models, and governance to facilitate designer and engineer adoption and extension.
• Define reusable interaction patterns for AI-native products, focusing on how people direct, trust, review, and collaborate with AI agents.
• Pioneer AI-assisted design-system workflows using coding agents to generate UI, understand component usage, measure adherence, and accelerate the design-to-implementation process.
• Extend the system by partnering with product teams to address complex workflows and translate solutions into reusable patterns.

Benefits

• Generous medical, dental, and vision benefits
• Flexible time off
• Monthly credits for professional development, general wellness, Assembled customers, and commuting
• Paid parental leave
• Catered lunches every day (M–F) and fully stocked SF office
• 401(k) plan enrollment
• Stock options

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed