Software Engineer, Design Systems

AbbVie•North Chicago, IL

4d•$84,500 - $162,000

About The Position

Unity is AbbVie's enterprise design system — the shared tokens, components, standards, and documentation that enable rapid, compliant, high-quality digital product delivery at scale. The Unity Design System team is transitioning Unity into a fully AI-enabled, agent-ready platform: AI-assisted design-to-code, Claude Code skills, MCP integrations, and AI-driven UI delivery, with humans in the loop to curate, approve, and evolve standards. This role sits on the developer-facing side of Unity. The person in this seat is a hands-on, full-stack-leaning engineer and the visible “face” of Unity development — building the React component library and developer tooling, pioneering agentic AI workflows, and serving the 600+ member developer community as a trusted, go-to resource. Work collaboratively across the Unity Design System team, BTS, and AbbVie’s developer and design communities to independently identify, conceive, design, engineer, and optimize developer-facing components, tooling, and AI-assisted workflows that accelerate compliant, high-quality digital product delivery across the enterprise. Serve as a hands-on, full-stack-leaning builder across React/TypeScript components and design tokens, Python/Node.js services and automation, and agentic AI integrations; gather requirements directly from developers, QA work, deploy solutions, and close fast feedback loops. Establish trust and credibility as a go-to resource for Unity development needs and act as the developer-facing face of the design system.

Requirements

Bachelor’s Degree in a relevant field and 5 years’ experience, or Master’s Degree in a relevant field and 4 years of experience.
Experienced front-end engineer with strong/proficient React and TypeScript skills, strong HTML/CSS, and proven design-system/component-library development experience.
Strong understanding and awareness of design tokens / tokenization and scalable theming.
Demonstrated hands-on experience developing agentic AI and AI workflows, including Claude Code skills and AI-assisted developer tooling.
Backend and full-stack capability with Python and Node.js.
Proficiency with the team toolstack: Storybook, GitHub, and accessibility/WCAG testing tools (e.g., Axe).
Strong testing and QA discipline — consistently QAs own work.
Experience building products for a developer-facing audience, with the ability to “meet developers where they are.”
Proven ability to work independently, generate and gather requirements, document technical work, communicate with stakeholders, appropriately escalate issues, and operate with fast feedback loops while co-owning responsibilities.
Excellent written and oral English communication; strong community outreach and relationship-building; a proactive, collaborative team player.

Nice To Haves

Developer skills beyond JS/React (e.g., Angular, additional languages/frameworks).
Data science background and data-visualization experience.
Front-end automation experience.
Familiarity with MCP servers (Figma MCP, Storybook MCP), Figma / Code Connect, and OutSystems.
Experience with developer relations (DevRel) and community management.
Mobile development experience (nice to have).

Responsibilities

Design, build, test, and maintain reusable, accessible React/TypeScript components for the Unity React library, with deep attention to design tokens/tokenization, theming (light/dark, density modes), composability, and Storybook documentation.
Build and advance AI-assisted and agentic developer workflows — including Claude Code skills, MCP server integrations (Figma, Storybook), context/markdown files, and prompt-to-code/design-to-code pipelines — that enable developers and AI agents to deliver Unity-compliant UI at scale.
Develop full-stack supporting services, front-end automation, and build/release/validation tooling using Python and Node.js (CI/CD, design-ops, compliance checks).
Own quality end-to-end - write and maintain automated tests, perform accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA) and cross-browser QA using the team toolstack (Storybook, Axe, GitHub), and QA your own work before release.
Act as the developer-facing face of Unity — provide community support, outreach, and management; build relationships, run demos/office hours/presentations, and establish trust and credibility as the go-to resource for Unity development.
Independently gather and generate requirements from developer-community needs, translate them into actionable work, maintain appropriate technical documentation, and communicate project objectives, progress, issues, and escalations to relevant stakeholders through quick feedback loops.
Contribute to Unity's data-visualization capabilities and support data-science-driven features, applying a data-science background and data-visualization experience where applicable.
Wear multiple hats and context-switch as a co-owner of team responsibilities across requirements, development, QA/testing, deployment, application development, community building, and presentations.
Learn, master, and stay current with evolving AI development and productivity tooling; pilot, evaluate, and help roll out improvements (e.g., Storybook MCP, AI documentation, and new productivity tools) across the team.
Contribute technical guidance and support or mentor colleagues as appropriate; partner with designers, brand, accessibility, and BTS stakeholders; and adhere to corporate standards, including the code of conduct, data security, GxP compliance where applicable, and the software development lifecycle (SDLC).