Lead Design Engineer

San Francisco, United StatesHybrid

Responsibilities

Design highly interactive components and translate design specs into production-quality code with precise attention to spacing, color, typography, motion, and interaction behavior
Review designer PRs that touch shared UI surfaces and design system contributions from feature engineers
Maintain and improve design system documentation so engineers and designers can self-serve without pinging you for every variant
Building and maintaining production-quality components using modern React (hooks, composition patterns)

Come help us build the next great version of our app, which is changing the way people edit video.
Experience team in our Engineering organization. You’ll work at the intersection of code that ships to prod and design decisions that delights users.
Be the primary force behind the codebase with design support in Figma. You’ll build, maintain, document, and evolve shared components, tokens, and patterns
Fluent in Figma. It may not be your first choice for building, but you can create the resources designers need in there
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
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
Descript is building a simple, intuitive, fully-powered editing tool for video and audio — an editing tool built for the age of AI.

8+ years building products in some capacity as long both design and engineering are in there somewhere.

The base salary range for this role is $247,000 - 280,000.
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.

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
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
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
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:
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