Lead Design Engineer

Step; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Step is seeking a Design Systems Engineer to own the design platform, shared foundations, tooling, and workflows that unite product design and production engineering across mobile and web. You will translate high-fidelity designs into production-ready components with strong visual accuracy and dependable behavior, while collaborating with engineering to build scalable, performant, accessible architectures.

We expect experience shipping high-quality apps, excellent communication across teams, and

Qualifications

• Significant experience creating and evolving design systems for modern consumer software.
• Strong ability to work across design and engineering, with enough fluency in both disciplines to influence decisions and implementation.
• Experience shipping high-quality mobile or web applications and reviewing production implementations.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills across product, design, and technical teams.
• Curiosity about AI and emerging design tools, with a willingness to rethink established product-development workflows.
• Portfolio or work examples demonstrating technical execution and thoughtful design-systems practice.

Responsibilities

• Keep the design system and production implementation aligned, with shared components, tokens, foundations, and patterns across iOS, Android, and web.
• Translate high-fidelity designs into production-ready components with strong visual accuracy and dependable behavior.
• Collaborate with engineering to create scalable, flexible, performant, accessible component architecture that teams can adopt easily.
• Improve design-to-code workflows through tooling, automation, documentation, versioning, and developer experience improvements.
• Establish governance for component APIs, naming, tokens, releases, adoption, and quality while reducing friction between design and engineering.
• Explore AI-assisted workflows and internal tools that make designing, building, documenting, and maintaining products faster and more reliable.

Job description

Role overview

Build the systems that bring product design and production engineering closer together. This role owns the design platform, shared foundations, tooling, and workflows that help teams deliver consistent, accessible, high-quality experiences across mobile and web. The work spans design tools, production code, documentation, automation, and emerging AI-assisted workflows; it is focused on enabling product teams rather than simply maintaining a component library.

Responsibilities

• Keep the design system and production implementation aligned, with shared components, tokens, foundations, and patterns across iOS, Android, and web.
• Translate high-fidelity designs into production-ready components with strong visual accuracy and dependable behavior.
• Collaborate with engineering to create scalable, flexible, performant, accessible component architecture that teams can adopt easily.
• Improve design-to-code workflows through tooling, automation, documentation, versioning, and developer experience improvements.
• Establish governance for component APIs, naming, tokens, releases, adoption, and quality while reducing friction between design and engineering.
• Explore AI-assisted workflows and internal tools that make designing, building, documenting, and maintaining products faster and more reliable.

Requirements

• Significant experience creating and evolving design systems for modern consumer software.
• Strong ability to work across design and engineering, with enough fluency in both disciplines to influence decisions and implementation.
• Experience shipping high-quality mobile or web applications and reviewing production implementations.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills across product, design, and technical teams.
• Curiosity about AI and emerging design tools, with a willingness to rethink established product-development workflows.
• Portfolio or work examples demonstrating technical execution and thoughtful design-systems practice.

Nice to have

• Experience with cross-platform component libraries or React Native.
• Experience building token pipelines, design-system tooling, Figma plugins, Storybook-style documentation, or internal developer tools.
• Experience applying AI to design workflows, repetitive tasks, or product-development tooling.