Staff Product Design Engineer

Pie Insurance

15h•$165,000 - $205,000•Remote

About The Position

Pie's mission is to empower small businesses to thrive by making commercial insurance affordable and as easy as pie. We leverage technology to transform how small businesses buy and experience commercial insurance. Like our small business customers, we are a diverse team of builders, dreamers, and entrepreneurs who are driven by core values and operating principles that guide every decision we make. A Staff Product Design Engineer at Pie serves as the technical owner and architect of Pie’s Design System, Amber, ensuring scalable, performant, and intelligent user interfaces across our platform. This role sits at the intersection of Design and Engineering, combining front-end architecture, design systems development, and emerging AI-assisted workflows. This individual will spend approximately 60–70% of their time hands-on building and evolving Pie’s Design System, Amber, with the remainder focused on system governance, documentation, tooling, and enabling teams through automation and AI-powered development practices. The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in modern front-end engineering, design systems implementation, and experience integrating developer tooling with AI platforms such as Cursor, Claude Code, or similar.

Requirements

High school diploma/GED required.
8+ years of experience building front-end applications or design systems in modern web environments.
Proven experience owning or significantly contributing to a production design system.
Deep expertise in modern JavaScript frameworks (React preferred) and component-driven architecture.
Strong understanding of design tokens, theming, accessibility (WCAG), and responsive design principles.
Experience working within Agile software development environments.
Demonstrated experience collaborating closely with Product Designers and translating design artifacts into scalable implementations.
Strong documentation and communication skills enabling adoption across technical and non-technical audiences.
Ability to influence technical direction without direct authority.
Experience with Figma, Storybook (or similar), Git workflows, and modern CI/CD practices.
Exceptional organizational skills with the ability to manage multiple concurrent initiatives.
Ability to travel up to 15% may be required.

Nice To Haves

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, Design Engineering, or related field preferred.
Familiarity with AI-assisted coding tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, or similar platforms.

Responsibilities

Design System Architecture and Engineering:
Own and evolve the technical architecture of Pie’s Amber Design System, including component libraries, tokens, theming, accessibility standards, and front-end patterns.
Build scalable, production-ready UI components that enable consistent experiences across internal and customer-facing applications.
Establish engineering standards and contribution models that allow product teams to safely adopt and extend Amber.
Partner closely with Product Design to translate design intent into performant, reusable code.
Ensure system scalability through strong versioning, dependency management, and backward-compatibility strategies.
Development & Integration:
Develop and maintain Amber’s component library using modern front-end frameworks and tooling.
Integrate design tokens and system primitives across applications to reduce duplication and technical debt.
Collaborate with platform and application engineering teams to embed Amber deeply into the SDLC.
Improve developer experience through tooling, automation, and improved implementation workflows.
Optimize performance, accessibility, and responsiveness across all system components.
AI-Enabled Development & Automation:
Lead integration of Amber with AI-assisted development workflows (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, and emerging AI coding tools).
Define patterns that allow AI agents and developers to generate UI consistently using Amber standards.
Create structured documentation and machine-readable patterns that improve AI code generation accuracy.
Explore and implement AI-driven approaches to component generation, testing, and documentation maintenance.
Partner with engineering leadership to establish safe and scalable AI development practices.
Document & Enablement:
Own Amber documentation strategy, ensuring clarity for designers, engineers, and AI tooling alike.
Build developer onboarding materials, usage guidelines, and implementation examples.
Establish governance models for contributions, reviews, and system evolution.
Drive adoption through workshops, office hours, and cross-functional collaboration.
Stakeholder Collaboration:
Partner with Product, Design, and Engineering leadership to align system investments with business priorities.
Act as a technical thought partner helping teams balance speed, quality, and long-term scalability.
Advocate for system-level thinking that improves consistency and reduces rework across teams.
Technical Thought Leadership:
Anticipate industry shifts in front-end architecture, design systems, and AI-assisted development.
Introduce modern patterns that improve velocity while maintaining strong engineering rigor.
Champion experimentation and continuous improvement across tooling, workflows, and developer experience.