Senior Design Engineer - GM Design System

GM • Austin, TX

5d

About The Position

We're looking for a Senior Design Engineer to help evolve and scale our enterprise design system for the web. In this role, you'll collaborate with designers, engineers, and platform teams to build accessible, performant, and reusable components that power consistent experiences across multiple products and platforms. You'll also contribute to the processes, tools, and standards that enable design excellence at scale, including establishing the patterns and infrastructure needed to support AI-assisted design and development workflows.

Requirements

• A bachelor's degree in a technical or design related field, or work experience commensurate with education.
• 5+ years of experience working as a professional Design Engineer or Design Technologist.
• Experience building or contributing to design systems or UI libraries.
• Strong experience with modern HTML, modern CSS architecture, vanilla JavaScript, and TypeScript (independent of framework abstractions).
• Solid understanding of front-end architecture and strategies for scaling CSS in enterprise environments.
• Deep knowledge of semantic HTML, WCAG, and ARIA accessibility standards.
• Experience with progressive enhancement and performance optimization.
• Experience with design tokens, Style Dictionary, or similar tools.
• Hands-on experience or active experimentation with AI-enabled design systems, LLM context generation (e.g., custom instructions, rules, or system prompts for code assistants), or AI-driven UI workflows.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building Web Components
• Experience with React, Angular, or other modern JavaScript frameworks.
• Experience building with Stencil.
• Knowledge of testing frameworks (e.g., Jest, Playwright) and visual regression tools.
• Curiosity for emerging front-end techniques and a passion for continuous learning.
• Background in web design, design tooling, or collaborating heavily with design teams.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain a scalable design system authored in Stencil and distributed as framework-agnostic Web Components.
• Extend the system to React and Angular consumers through framework wrappers and integration support.
• Write semantic, accessible HTML aligned with WCAG and WAI-ARIA best practices, including keyboard navigation, focus management, and screen reader support.
• Ensure consistent behavior across browsers, devices, and assistive technologies.
• Build modular, maintainable CSS for large-scale applications.
• Build flexible, reusable components with a focus on performance, accessibility, and self-documentation.
• Translate Figma designs into production-ready code, collaborating closely with designers.
• Contribute to design system documentation and to the coding standards and best practices that keep it consistent over time.
• Work with engineering teams to integrate components into CI/CD pipelines and support robust testing (unit, visual regression, accessibility).
• Explore and integrate AI capabilities into design system workflows, streamlining component generation, design token mapping, and automated documentation.
• Make the design system consumable by AI coding tools and agents as easily as by people, publishing components, tokens, and usage guidelines in machine-readable formats with Storybook as the foundation.

Benefits

• We believe we all must make a choice every day – individually and collectively – to drive meaningful change through our words, our deeds and our culture.
• Every day, we want every employee to feel they belong to one General Motors team.
• From day one, we're looking out for your well-being–at work and at home–so you can focus on realizing your ambitions.
• Learn how GM supports a rewarding career that rewards you personally by visiting Total Rewards resources.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior