Lead Design Engineer

Descript•San Francisco, CA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

You’ve probably gone by many titles in your day: designer, engineer, creative technologist — today you may just be calling yourself a product builder. Come help us build the next great version of our app, which is changing the way people edit video. Here, you’ll go by the title Lead Design Engineer, report to the head of Product Design, and collaborate closely with our Builder Experience team in our Engineering organization. You’ll work at the intersection of code that ships to prod and design decisions that delights users. Your impact will be felt everywhere: on our design system, in product, and every once in a while in web experiences built to truly show off how creative our brand can be. You’ll also be a mentor to designers at various stages of their journey into hybrid ways of working.

Requirements

8+ years building products in some capacity as long both design and engineering are in there somewhere.
A way to help us understand your technical skill and design taste as part of your application. This can be a design portfolio, links to live projects, slide deck, or video walk-through — whatever tells your story!
Experience building or maintaining a product design system at production scale — tokens, component APIs, versioning, migration paths, documentation
High-polish front-end skills that include motion
Fluent in Figma. It may not be your first choice for building, but you can create the resources designers need in there
Clear communication across media. You know a design system’s job isn’t done until its consumers know how to use it
Making our design system accessible and easy to build with by designers, engineers, and agents
Building and maintaining production-quality components using modern React (hooks, composition patterns)
Ability to design strongly-typed component APIs (e.g., replacing string props with proper named types)
Proficiency with CSS modules, CSS custom properties (var(--semantic-token)), and the discipline to use semantic tokens over primitives
Accessibility knowledge that goes beyond color contrast — keyboard navigation, focus management, screen reader behavior, ARIA labels.

Nice To Haves

Know what it’s like to be a one-of-one and/or first-of-type in your organization
Have worked on design systems for complex products in creative tooling or an analogous space
Know how to make smart use of AI in design system workflows, by creating tools like agent skills, rules and automations for designers and engineers
Have tried your hand at internal tools and resources for designing, prototyping, and bringing specs to life (beyond the design system and documentation itself)
Are at least familiar with headless CMS tools, electron apps, and other technical systems the design system may overlap with

Responsibilities

Be the primary force behind the codebase with design support in Figma. You’ll 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. Help them 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 to the product and as a resource to teams
Unblock product squads by giving them components that are flexible enough to use without forking and opinionated enough to enforce consistency
Maintain and improve design system documentation so engineers and designers can self-serve without pinging you for every variant
Contribute to the evolution our ways of working so everyone can build on vibes while staying true to our system and standards