Staff Design Engineer

Scribe•San Francisco, CA

8d•$215,000 - $280,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Scribe is seeking a Staff Design Engineer to own Stylus, their design system, and ensure the quality of their web app, desktop app, browser extension, and marketing site. This role sits at the intersection of design and frontend engineering, focusing on judgment and execution in product development. The Staff Design Engineer will drive design craft, including product polish, prototyping, and interaction quality, as well as platform power, including frontend tooling, developer experience, and internal AI agents and skills. The company emphasizes a fast-paced, builder-oriented culture with a strong focus on customer and team care.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in front-end development.
Strong design sensibility.
Deep knowledge of CSS, the DOM, and browser rendering.
Ability to articulate decisions on using native platform elements versus framework versions.
Design ability to make calls on interactions and assess their cost-effectiveness.
Experience working deeply on a design system, including components, primitives, tokens, versioning, adoption, and governance.
Ability to shape work and manage a roadmap, including knowing when to decline requests.
Experience building with AI tools like Cursor and Claude Code.
Proficiency in handling accessibility, keyboard and touch input, and user preferences by default.

Nice To Haves

Figma plugins, automations, or CI checks for design system adoption and accessibility.
Experience with web components or multi-framework development, including shipping systems to non-React surfaces.
Experience with desktop apps or browser extensions, particularly always-on ones.
Experience with agent-facing or generative UI work.

Responsibilities

Own Stylus, including its roadmap, triage, and decision-making on component inclusion, measured by component adoption, accessibility coverage, and documentation health.
Set the direction for the design system while incorporating requests from engineers and designers.
Build complex components where aesthetics and performance are critical, deciding which elements become shared primitives and which remain one-off.
Prototype in React and TypeScript for explorations that are faster in code than in Figma, such as animation, keyboard, and touch interactions, and test these prototypes with users.
Collaborate with designers, iterating in Figma or directly in code, and providing accurate cost estimates for interactions.
Ensure design and code alignment by keeping tokens aligned with design, migrating legacy components to the system, and maintaining useful Figma-to-code tooling.
Adapt the design system for AI agents and emerging UX patterns, building primitives for AI-assembled UIs.
Document and share prompts, patterns, and workflows used with AI tools like Cursor and Claude Code.
Mentor engineers on design principles.