Senior Design Engineer, Design Systems

Clipboard • San Francisco, CA

2d • $180,000 - $250,000 • Remote

About The Position

Clipboard is looking for a Senior Design Engineer to build their design system from the ground up, scale it, and close the gap between how Clipboard is designed and how it's built. The system will serve as the backbone and experience infrastructure for all of EPD's products. The role involves owning the connective tissue between design and engineering, shaping the architecture and foundations of the system, building reusable components, and bridging the gap between Figma and production. The candidate will create patterns and practices for shipping high-quality UI and build AI tooling to enable prototyping and building system-led experiences. This is a critical role with high impact and influence across product, design, and engineering, requiring a high bar for craft, strong frontend engineering judgment, deep design-systems experience, and genuine excitement for the work.

Requirements

• 6+ years building production frontend design systems that serve multiple product surfaces across mobile and web.
• Strong frontend engineering across modern web technologies and component-based architecture, with the ability to ramp quickly in a large, established codebase.
• High UI and UX craft with strong product taste, and a clear read on whether an interface is polished, usable, accessible, flexible, and maintainable.
• Deep experience building and maintaining component libraries, design-token pipelines, Storybook, visual regression, and Figma workflows or plugins.
• Strong accessibility fundamentals across mobile and web.
• Experience standing up or consolidating design systems and aligning Figma libraries with production code.
• Real experience using AI to ship prototypes, components, and system work faster.
• Experience building the resources that make a system usable by AI, the skills, documentation, and rules that let others build against it correctly with AI.
• Strong communication that raises the work around them, explaining decisions clearly to specialists and non-specialists and making the right path the easy one for designers and engineers.
• A bias for building, making ideas real in code, learning from how they behave, and iterating from there.
• Senior judgment to work through ambiguity, focus on the highest-leverage work, and sequence change in a way teams can actually adopt.
• A body of work showing shipped design-engineering impact across production UI, component systems, prototypes, and system documentation.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with two-sided marketplaces, or products where both sides of a transaction depend on each other.
• Experience designing for healthcare, operations-heavy, or other high-stakes real-world domains.

Responsibilities

• Establish the system's architecture and foundations across Figma and code, from primitives and tokens through components and patterns to critical user flows.
• Build reusable, production-ready components with the full range of states, interaction, motion, and accessibility built in.
• Keep design and code in sync as the system grows, closing gaps when Figma, code, and Storybook fall out of alignment.
• Define what good looks like in the system, set the standards, and hold teams' work to them so it stays consistent, accessible, and high quality.
• Create AI tooling and skills that let all of EPD prototype and build leveraging the system and design best practices.
• Write the documentation, usage guidance, and component rules that let people and AI build with the system correctly across Figma, code, and Storybook.
• Partner with designers, product managers, and engineers on how the system holds up in complex workflows and edge cases, and take those decisions into the system.

What This Job Offers

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