Senior Frontend Engineer, Design System

Synthesia; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Synthesia is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Design System team and co-own the shared UI foundation across products. You will deliver high-quality component code and tooling, with a focus on AI-friendly design principles that enable both human and AI authors to build on-brand interfaces.

You'll partner with design, product, and engineering to define components, ensure accessibility and performance, and shape the system's direction over the next 6–12 months, driving adoption across

Qualifications

• Five+ years as a software engineer with senior ownership of frontend platforms.
• Deep HTML/CSS/JavaScript/TypeScript with React and modern tooling.
• Strong API design and developer experience for shared libraries.
• Experience or interest in making component libraries AI-friendly.
• Evidence of building accessible, responsive UI that works across browsers.

Responsibilities

• Build, scale and evolve our design system, including component library, tokens and docs.
• Extend the design system for AI-assisted development with Storybook at the core.
• Design robust component APIs that discourage misuse by humans and AI.
• Write high-quality frontend code (React/TypeScript) with strong craftsmanship.
• Collaborate with design, product and engineering to deliver production-ready components.
• Ensure default accessibility, WCAG 2.2 AA compliance and assist with testing.
• Own developer experience: docs, guidelines, versioning and migration paths.
• Implement theming, multi-brand support and localization/RTL considerations.
• Drive adoption across teams based on metrics and feedback.

Skills

Design system owner

Frontend expert

React

TypeScript

API design

AI-ready components

WCAG accessibility

Cross-team collaboration

Tools

Storybook

Job description

Synthesia is the world's leading AI video platform for business, used by over 90% of the Fortune 100. Founded in 2017, the company is headquartered in London, with offices and teams across Europe and the US.

As AI continues to shape the way we live and work, Synthesia develops products to enhance visual communication and enterprise skill development, helping people work better and stay at the center of successful organizations.

Following our recent Series E funding round, where we raised $200 million, our valuation stands at $4 billion. Our total funding exceeds $530 million from premier investors including Accel, NVentures (Nvidia's VC arm), Kleiner Perkins, GV, and Evantic Capital, alongside the founders and operators of Stripe, Datadog, Miro, and Webflow.

About the role

As a Senior Software Engineer on our Design System team, you'll be a co-owner of the shared UI foundation that every Synthesia product is built on. You will be shaping direction and making key decisions together with the team, likely with a focus area of your own but context across the whole system. This is a hands-on engineering role: your primary output is high-quality component code and the tooling around it.

The defining challenge of this role is making that foundation AI-friendly: a design system that both people and AI can build with. As AI tools generate more of our UI, the system has to make it effortless to produce interfaces that are on-brand, accessible and correct by construction, whether the author is a human or an agent.

You can expect to:

• Build, scale and evolve our design system: the component library, design tokens, and documentation that give product teams a consistent, accessible foundation to build on.


• Extend our design system for AI-assisted development so AI coding tools and agents can use our components, tokens and guidelines as easily as people can, with Storybook as the backbone and machine-readable interfaces (e.g. MCP) layered on top.


• Design component APIs that resist misuse, so AI and human developers alike can build with confidence.


• Write high-quality, performant frontend code (React/TypeScript) and raise the bar for component craft and consistency across the engineering org.


• Partner closely with design, product and engineering to define components together and take them all the way to something that holds up in production.


• Make our components accessible by default, meeting WCAG 2.2 AA, and work closely with our Accessibility engineer to bake in best practices from the start.


• Own the developer experience of the design system: clear documentation, guidelines, Storybook, sensible component APIs, versioning and smooth migration paths that make adoption easy for both human and AI consumers.


• Implement and maintain theming, white labelling, and localization/RTL support so the system works for a global audience.


• Continuously improve the system based on adoption metrics, contributor feedback and new platform capabilities.


• Shape the technical direction of the design system over the next 6-12 months, championing its adoption across teams.

What we're looking for

• At least five (5) years as a software engineer, including three (3) at senior level, building frontend platforms, with real ownership of a design system or shared component library used across multiple products.


• Deep frontend expertise: expert HTML, CSS and JavaScript/TypeScript, with strong React and familiarity with modern build tooling.


• A strong command of component API design, versioning and the developer experience of shared libraries.


• Experience (or strong interest) in making component libraries consumable by AI


• Solid understanding of responsive design, cross-browser compatibility and web performance.


• Comfortable building components to WCAG 2.2 AA / EN 301 549 and verifying them yourself with a keyboard and screen reader — accessibility is part of your definition of done, not a separate pass.


• A strong sense of craft and attention to detail, and the ability to balance design intent with engineering constraints.


• Strong communication and collaboration skills, and a passion for improving developer productivity and end-user experience.

Nice to haves

• A strong design sensibility — an eye for visual detail and the judgement to push back on and improve design decisions, not just build them.


• Experience implementing multi-brand theming in production.


• Experience with localization and internationalization (including RTL) for a global audience.

Why join us?

We're living the golden age of AI. The next decade will yield the next iconic companies, and we dare to say we have what it takes to become one. Here's why,

Our culture

At Synthesia we're passionate about building, not talking, planning or politicising. We strive to hire the smartest, kindest and most unrelenting people and let them do their best work without distractions. Our work principles serve as our charter for how we make decisions, give feedback and structure our work to empower everyone to go as fast as possible. You can find out more about these principles here.

Serving 50,000+ customers (and 90% of the Fortune 500)

We're trusted by leading brands such as Heineken, Zoom, Xerox, McDonald's and more. Read stories from happy customers and what 1,200+ people say on G2.

Proprietary AI technology

Since 2017, we've been pioneering advancements in Generative AI. Our AI technology is built in-house, by a team of world-class AI researchers and engineers. Learn more about our AI Research Lab and the team behind.

AI Safety, Ethics and Security

AI safety, ethics, and security are fundamental to our mission. While the full scope of Artificial Intelligence's impact on our society is still unfolding, our position is clear: People first. Always. Learn more about our commitments to AI Ethics, Safety & Security.

The hiring process:

1. 30 min call with our Technical Recruiter


2. 45min call with an Engineering Manager about your past projects


3. 75min Live Coding interview, a collaboration exercise with our Engineer (not Leetcode style, focus more on good frontend engineering practices)


4. 60min System Design, technical discussion usually about a real problem we had in production (the call will also include our Designer so expect more design system focused discussion)


5. 60min call with leadership, focus on examples of collaboration, growth and going through details of your future team

Other important info:

• Our preference is for this role to based either in-office or remote in London, UK.
  We can also accommodate remote workers in other locations across Europe subject to compliance and right to work checks.


• The salary starts at EUR/GBP/CHF 120,000 base + stock option plan.


• This is full-time employment only, usually through OysterHR. No contractors possible.


• Everyone at Synthesia gets 25 days of leave + local holidays (no extra paid or unpaid leave possible).


• We only sponsor VISA if you are in the UK/EU country already and need support.