Senior Staff Engineer, Design Systems

About the company

The company helps teachers bring delight and rigor to students every day. We have become a leader in K–12 literacy, biliteracy, math, and science by building inspiring teaching and learning experiences based on research. The the company Classroom platform combines curriculum, assessment, and supplemental learning into one coherent high-quality instructional system. A pioneer in education since 2000, the company has developed deep relationships in states and districts by partnering with educators to drive implementation quality and improved outcomes. Today, the company serves more than 18 million students and teachers across all 50 states and on six continents. For more information, visit the company.com [link for members]

Job Description Summary

The company’s creative team is a group of designers, artists, and storytellers. We sketch, we write, we push pixels, and we also love paper. We live for the big ideas, and we sweat the details. Working across digital, print, and interactive experiences, we bring a hands-on, highly collaborative approach to product development and design systems.

A Senior Staff Engineer on the company’s Product Brand team leads the technical architecture and implementation strategy for the company’s next-generation Design System, enabling consistent, accessible, and maintainable experiences across products and platforms. Working at the intersection of Engineering, Product Design, accessibility, and emerging technologies, this role translates shared design standards into scalable technical solutions that can be adopted across the the company ecosystem.

This role offers the opportunity to shape the Design System from an early stage, defining its technical foundations, engineering standards, and ways of working. In close partnership with Product, Design, and Engineering leadership, the Senior Staff Engineer drives technical alignment, contribution models, and adoption across teams. As a hands-on technical leader, this person builds and validates solutions, improves development workflows, explores AI-assisted engineering practices, and mentors engineers to support a sustainable, widely adopted Design System.

Essential Responsibilities

• Architect and build the technical foundations of the company’s next-generation Design System, including reusable component libraries, design tokens, and frontend infrastructure that support consistent brand expression across the company products.

• Partner with Design, Product, and Engineering leads to align technical strategy, priorities, and implementation approaches across teams.

• Build relationships with stakeholders across the company, proactively identifying dependencies, navigating competing requirements, and communicating technical decisions and tradeoffs.

• Lead cross-team technical discussions, build consensus around shared standards, and drive Design System adoption across products without direct reporting authority.

• Collaborate with Product Designers to translate design standards and component contracts into scalable, maintainable, and accessible implementations.

• Establish engineering standards, implementation patterns, and code quality practices that support consistency, accessibility, and maintainability across products and platforms.

• Develop and maintain design system infrastructure, including repositories, component documentation, release processes, and contribution workflows that enable engineering teams to adopt and extend shared systems.

• Explore and implement AI-assisted development workflows to improve the efficiency and quality of component development, testing, and documentation.

• Provide technical mentorship, architectural guidance, and code review support to engineers implementing Design System standards.

• Help establish and lead technical governance processes, balancing consistency and shared standards with product-specific requirements, technical constraints, performance, and business needs.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of relevant work experience. Relevant fields include:

• Front-end Developer

• UI Engineer

• Design Technologist

• Design engineer

• Fluent in:

• Modern React, TypeScript, and JavaScript

• Semantic HTML, CSS, and responsive design

• Design systems architecture, reusable UI components, and design tokens

• Figma for design-to-code workflows

• Git and collaborative software development

• Frontend build tools, component packaging, and testing

• Web accessibility standards (WCAG) and accessible interaction patterns

• Scalable frontend architecture across multiple applications and technology stacks

• Body of work demonstrating experience building polished user interfaces, responsive layouts, and web apps. At least some of the examples should be built with React.

• Demonstrated experience leading cross-functional technical initiatives, influencing engineering decisions across teams, and managing stakeholders with competing priorities.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with design in education technology or a related field

• Storybook or similar component documentation and development tools

• Familiarity with CSS custom properties, design tokens, and token-driven styling architectures

• Familiarity with scalable CSS methodologies

• Familiarity with contract-based design systems and component contracts

• Redux and state management

• Building, publishing and maintaining Figma UI component libraries

• Building AI skills and modern token-driven design systems

The company is an Equal Opportunity Employer. The company makes employment decisions based on qualifications and merit, and does not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability status, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic or status.

The company is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities, including disabled veterans. If you have a disability and need an accommodation in connection with the application or hiring process, please email [link for members]

If you are selected for employment, a background check will be required. As required by state and local laws and district policies, you may be required to provide additional documentation, such as proof of vaccination, or submit to enhanced background screening, such as fingerprinting.

The company is an E-Verify participant.