Design Systems Engineer (6-Month Contract)

Viventium Software•,

1d•$75 - $80

About The Position

This is a forensic and remediation role rather than a greenfield design system role. You'll read our existing codebase, evaluate and extend a partial Storybook setup, document what's there honestly, flag what's broken (especially accessibility), and produce the artifact our design team will use to rebuild the Figma library on top of code that's actually shipped. You'll work closely with two partners: the existing tech lead, who's already invested in this direction and will be your closest engineering collaborator, and the design team, who are both the primary consumer of your output and a daily partner in shaping it.

Requirements

Strong current Angular experience (Angular 16+, with standalone components, signals, and the modern control flow syntax), and deep familiarity with Storybook's Angular framework (Storybook 8+, CSF3) and Chromatic. You can talk fluently about the tradeoffs of different story-authoring patterns, controls, and test integrations within the Angular Storybook ecosystem.
Substantive prior experience on a design system or internal platform/tooling team — you've contributed to or owned one, not just consumed one.
Strong CSS and front-end fundamentals, with a real depth in accessibility (WCAG, ARIA patterns, focus management, screen reader behavior), theming, responsive design, typographic systems, and motion. A meaningful portion of this role is identifying and remediating accessibility failures, so it's not somewhere we can afford a soft spot.
Taste and product sense in component API design. You can walk through a component you're proud of and explain the decisions behind its API — prop naming, variant structure, what you chose not to expose.
Working comfort with AI-assisted engineering workflows (Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, or similar). You treat AI as a power tool with known failure modes, not a magic wand — and you're clear-eyed that the tooling is meaningfully less mature for Angular than for React, so it'll help with the boilerplate work but won't accelerate this project as much as it might in a React codebase.
Comfort reading unfamiliar codebases and reasoning about component semantics from code alone. The first few months of this work is archaeology — figuring out what exists and how it really behaves — and you need to be at home in that mode.

Nice To Haves

Experience working closely with a design team — pairing with designers, co-owning component decisions, translating design intent into component APIs.
Experience with consolidation or migration work, taking a sprawling, inconsistent codebase and bringing it toward a canonical state. This is the hardest part of the job, and most greenfield design system experience doesn't prepare you for it.
Experience inheriting and upgrading an existing Storybook setup — auditing configuration, modernizing addons, untangling story conventions that have drifted. This matches the actual day-one state of the role.
Familiarity with headless or accessibility-primitive libraries in the Angular ecosystem (Angular CDK, Spartan/ng, ng-primitives, or wrapping web-component libraries like Shoelace), and an articulate view on when to wrap them versus build primitives from scratch.
Open source contributions to design system or developer tooling projects, or experience writing public-facing component documentation that designers and PMs (not just engineers) actually use.