Lead Design Engineer

Descript•San Francisco, CA

2d•$247,000 - $280,000•Hybrid

About The Position

This role is for a Lead Design Engineer who will be responsible for building the next version of the company's app, which is changing the way people edit video. The Lead Design Engineer will report to the head of Product Design and collaborate with the Builder Experience team. The role involves working at the intersection of code that ships to production and design decisions that delight users. The impact of this role will be felt across the design system, product, and web experiences. The individual will also mentor designers in hybrid ways of working.

Requirements

8+ years building products in some capacity, with experience in both design and engineering.
A portfolio, links to live projects, slide deck, or video walk-through to demonstrate technical skill and design taste.
Experience building or maintaining a product design system at production scale, including tokens, component APIs, versioning, migration paths, and documentation.
High-polish front-end skills that include motion.
Fluent in Figma, capable of creating necessary resources for designers.
Clear communication across media, understanding that 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 beyond color contrast, including keyboard navigation, focus management, screen reader behavior, and ARIA labels.

Nice To Haves

Experience being a one-of-one and/or first-of-type in an organization.
Worked on design systems for complex products in creative tooling or an analogous space.
Knowledge of making smart use of AI in design system workflows, creating tools like agent skills, rules, and automations for designers and engineers.
Experience with internal tools and resources for designing, prototyping, and bringing specs to life (beyond the design system and documentation).
Familiarity 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, building, maintaining, documenting, and evolving 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, attending crits, giving feedback, and helping 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 for every variant.
Contribute to the evolution of ways of working so everyone can build on vibes while staying true to our system and standards.