Lead Design Engineer
Job description
About the role
You’ve probably gone by many titles in your day: designer, engineer, creative technologist — today you may just be calling yourself a product builder. Come help us build the next great version of our app, which is changing the way people edit video.
Here, you’ll go by the title Lead Design Engineer, report to the head of Product Design, and collaborate closely with our Builder Experience team in our Engineering organization. You’ll work at the intersection of code that ships to prod and design decisions that delights users.
Your impact will be felt everywhere: on our design system, in product, and every once in a while in web experiences built to truly show off how creative our brand can be. You’ll also be a mentor to designers at various stages of their journey into hybrid ways of working.
What you’ll do
- Be the primary force behind the codebase with design support in Figma. You’ll build, maintain, document, and evolve shared components, tokens, and patterns
- Design highly interactive components and translate design specs into production-quality code with precise attention to spacing, color, typography, motion, and interaction behavior
- Partner with product designers to close the gap between what’s in Figma and what ships. Attend crits. Give feedback. Help them think through edge cases or technical realities
- Review designer PRs that touch shared UI surfaces and design system contributions from feature engineers
- Move the accessibility of our product forward through direct contributions to the product and as a resource to teams
- Unblock product squads by giving them components that are flexible enough to use without forking and opinionated enough to enforce consistency
- Maintain and improve design system documentation so engineers and designers can self-serve without pinging you for every variant
- Contribute to the evolution our ways of working so everyone can build on vibes while staying true to our system and standards
The must-haves
This is a unique role that may have followed many career paths, but these are the things we’re not going to budge on:
- 8+ years building products in some capacity as long both design and engineering are in there somewhere.
- A way to help us understand your technical skill and design taste as part of your application. This can be a design portfolio, links to live projects, slide deck, or video walk-through — whatever tells your story!
- Experience building or maintaining a product design system at production scale — tokens, component APIs, versioning, migration paths, documentation
- High-polish front-end skills that include motion
- Fluent in Figma. It may not be your first choice for building, but you can create the resources designers need in there
- Clear communication across media. You know a design system’s job isn’t done until its consumers know how to use it
The technical stuff
The person who fills this role needs to work on more than vibes alone (although everyone is encouraged to automate and vibe what they can here). These are the core technical skills this person will need to be successful in this role:
- Making our design system accessible and easy to build with by designers, engineers, and agents
- Building and maintaining production-quality components using modern React (hooks, composition patterns)
- Ability to design strongly-typed component APIs (e.g., replacing string props with proper named types)
- Proficiency with CSS modules, CSS custom properties (var(--semantic-token)), and the discipline to use semantic tokens over primitives
- Accessibility knowledge that goes beyond color contrast — keyboard navigation, focus management, screen reader behavior, ARIA labels.
The flexible bits
As an excellent fit for this role, you probably:
- Know what it’s like to be a one-of-one and/or first-of-type in your organization
- Have worked on design systems for complex products in creative tooling or an analogous space
- Know how to make smart use of AI in design system workflows, by creating tools like agent skills, rules and automations for designers and engineers
- Have tried your hand at internal tools and resources for designing, prototyping, and bringing specs to life (beyond the design system and documentation itself)
- Are at least familiar with headless CMS tools, electron apps, and other technical systems the design system may overlap with
In exchange…
The base salary range for this role is $247,000 - 280,000. Final offer amounts will carefully consider multiple factors, including prior experience, expertise, location, level, and may vary from the amount above.
When applying, please put the word "analog" as the first word in your cover letter.
About Descript
Descript is building a simple, intuitive, fully-powered editing tool for video and audio — an editing tool built for the age of AI. We are a team of 150 and the backing of some of the world's greatest investors (OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Spark Capital).
Descript is the special company that's in possession of both product market fit and the raw materials (passionate user community, great product, large market) for growth, but is still early enough that each new employee has a measurable influence on the direction of the company.
Benefits include a generous healthcare package, 401k matching program, catered lunches, and flexible vacation time. Our headquarters are located in the Mission District of San Francisco, CA. We're hiring for a mix of remote roles and hybrid roles. For those who are remote, we have a handful of opportunities throughout the year for in person collaboration. For our hybrid roles, we're flexible, and you're an adult—we don't expect or mandate that you're in the office every day. We do believe there are valuable and serendipitous moments of discovery and collaboration that come from working together in person.
Descript is an equal opportunity workplace—we are dedicated to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or Veteran status. We believe in actively building a team rich in diverse backgrounds, experiences, and opinions to better allow our employees, products, and community to thrive.
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