Senior Design Engineer II - Design System

📋 Description

• • Kit is seeking a highly skilled Senior Design Engineer II to join their fully remote team, focusing on building and evolving the company's design system. This role is pivotal in bridging the gap between product surfaces and the underlying systems that ensure consistency, aiming to elevate UI quality across the entire application.
• • As a Senior Design Engineer, you will be instrumental in making independent visual and interaction design decisions, going beyond mere implementation of specifications. The ideal candidate will possess a dual proficiency, being equally adept at crafting designs in Figma and developing them in React.
• • The core mission of this position is to construct robust, scalable systems that enhance product-wide quality, minimize rework for feature squads, accelerate time-to-market, improve customer journeys, and empower designers to experiment and ship directly to production.
• • You will collaborate closely with the front-end engineering team, taking a lead role in the development and maintenance of shared foundational elements. This includes managing Storybook, creating and refining React components, defining and implementing design tokens, and optimizing the design-to-code workflow.
• • This is a full-time, senior individual contributor role designed for professionals who excel at the confluence of design and code, possess strong systems thinking capabilities, and are motivated by the prospect of creating the essential foundations that enable feature teams to deliver high-quality UI efficiently.
• • The impact of your work will be directly visible in the creator experience every time they interact with the Kit platform.
• • Your support system will be the Product Design team, with close collaboration across Engineering, Product, and various feature squads. You will report to the Director of Product Design and partner directly with front-end engineers, product designers, and feature project leaders who will depend on the system you build. You will also engage with product managers for new features requiring component evolution.
• • **First Week:** Your initial focus will be on immersing yourself in Kit's product surfaces and understanding the current component landscape. This involves attending introductory meetings with Product Design and Engineering, gaining access to Figma and the codebase, and grasping the existing UI consistency challenges.
• • **First Month:** You will conduct a thorough audit of the current UI to identify patterns, tokens, and inconsistencies. Subsequently, you will present your findings, assist in establishing the token architecture that maps between Figma and code, and begin implementing missing components in React.
• • **First Six Months:** This period involves establishing design tokens and primitives, ensuring seamless mapping between Figma and code in partnership with the front-end engineering team. You will lead the development of 5-8 core components to production quality, complete with comprehensive documentation, including the navigation component suite with defined performance targets. You will collaborate with designers to establish pattern standards and initiate React hand-offs for new feature development. A key objective is to measurably improve layout consistency across critical product surfaces. Additionally, you will support the product design team in leveraging AI to expedite design-to-code workflows, such as using AI-assisted code generation to transform Figma designs into functional components more rapidly.
• • **First Year:** The goal is to create a stable, predictable design-to-code workflow that feature squads can reliably depend on. You will drive high adoption of system components in new feature work, leading to demonstrable improvements in UI consistency across previously divergent surfaces. You will spearhead the evolution of our component library in Storybook, establishing it as the definitive reference for UI behavior and states. Furthermore, you will implement guardrails to proactively prevent UI drift, enabling feature squads to ship faster with higher-quality UI without requiring constant consultation.
• • This role demands a strong command of visual design principles and the confidence to make independent design decisions within a live product environment. Proficiency in React/TypeScript fundamentals, component architecture, design token architecture, and Figma-to-code mapping is essential.
• • Experience building and maintaining Storybook for component development, a deep understanding of interaction design, states, and edge cases, and the ability to identify and resolve UI inconsistencies in context are crucial.
• • You must possess strong systems thinking skills, the ability to build for scale, and excel at creating clear documentation and pattern guidance. Validating technical feasibility early in the design process is also a key requirement.
• • The ideal candidate will have 6+ years of relevant experience, with a significant portion dedicated to building, scaling, and maintaining design systems in production. Proven success in retrofitting and modernizing legacy UI systems, migrating inconsistent patterns into cohesive design systems, and prior experience working as a designer are highly valued.
• • Deep experience with composition and presentational component architecture in React, a proven track record of maintaining Storybook as a canonical UI reference, and experience building and managing design token systems with Figma integration are expected.
• • Evidence of successfully bridging design and code in a live product environment, experience collaborating with product designers and engineering teams, and hands-on experience implementing AI tooling to accelerate design-to-code workflows and automate consistency checks will set candidates apart.
• • We are looking for individuals who take initiative, demonstrate leadership in ambiguous, cross-functional settings, and can rally teams around a direction without formal authority. A systems thinker who prioritizes building foundations over features, and who is opinionated about design quality with a clear point of view, will thrive.
• • A detail-oriented approach with exceptional craft sensibility for visual and interaction quality, a low-ego, collaborative spirit that bridges design and engineering, and comfort with receiving feedback are essential. A pragmatic approach to balancing perfection with progress, clear communication skills to articulate tradeoffs and standards, and a focus on enabling others and reducing friction for feature teams are also key traits.
• • Candidates should be comfortable documenting decisions and sharing learnings to foster collective growth. Conversely, those seeking highly structured environments, preferring feature work over foundational system building, or experiencing discomfort with maintaining existing code and iterating on established patterns may not be the best fit. Difficulty balancing design intent with technical constraints, needing extensive direction to identify gaps, or prioritizing speed over quality and durability will also hinder success in this role.