Senior Design Engineer, Design Systems

Clipboard; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Clipboard is seeking a Senior Design Engineer to build our design system from the ground up, scale it, and close the gap between how Clipboard is designed and how its built. The system youll own is the backbone and experience infrastructure all of EPD builds products on.

Youll own the connective tissue between design and engineering, shaping the architecture and foundations of the system, building the reusable components, and closing the gap between Figma and production.

Qualifications

• 6+ years building production frontend design systems that serve multiple product surfaces across mobile and web.
• Strong frontend engineering across modern web technologies and component-based architecture.
• High UI and UX craft with product taste and accessibility.
• Deep experience building and maintaining component libraries, design-token pipelines, Storybook, visual regression, and Figma workflows or plugins.

Responsibilities

• Establish the system's architecture and foundations across Figma and code, from primitives and tokens through components and patterns to critical user flows.
• Build reusable, production-ready components with the full range of states, interaction, motion, and accessibility built in.
• Keep design and code in sync as the system grows, closing gaps when Figma, code, and Storybook fall out of alignment.
• Define what good looks like in the system, set the standards, and ensure consistency, accessibility, and high quality.
• Create AI tooling and skills that let all of EPD prototype and build leveraging the system and design best practices.
• Write the documentation, usage guidance, and component rules that let people and AI build with the system correctly across Figma, code, and Storybook.
• Partner with designers, product managers, and engineers on how the system holds up in complex workflows and edge cases.

Skills

Design systems

Frontend engineering

Figma to code

Storybook

AI tooling

UI/UX craft

Communication

Architectural judgment

Tools

Figma

Storybook

React

Job description

About Clipboard

Our mission is to uplift as many communities as possible. We do this through our app-based marketplace that connects healthcare professionals with the workplaces that need amazing workers. This enables hundreds of thousands of people to achieve financial stability for themselves and their families while providing essential care to millions of people across the U.S.

Founded in 2016, we are a remote-first team of over 1,000 people building a top Y-Combinator company and have been profitable since 2022. We're the leader in Long-Term Care staffing and are rapidly expanding into Home Health, Hospitals, and more, meaning we have more work to do than people to do it, and are growing our team to support millions more people and their communities.

About the role

We're looking for a Senior Design Engineer to build our design system from the ground up, scale it, and close the gap between how Clipboard is designed and how it's built. The system you'll own is the backbone and experience infrastructure all of EPD builds products on.

You'll own the connective tissue between design and engineering, shaping the architecture and foundations of the system, building the reusable components, and closing the gap between Figma and production. You'll create the patterns and practices that make high-quality UI easier to ship, and build the AI tooling that enables all of EPD to prototype and build quality, system-led experiences.

This is a critical role with high impact and influence across product, design, and engineering. The right candidate will bring a high bar for craft, strong frontend engineering judgment, deep design-systems experience, and a genuine excitement for what they do.

What you’ll do

• Establish the system's architecture and foundations across Figma and code, from primitives and tokens through components and patterns to critical user flows.

• Build reusable, production-ready components with the full range of states, interaction, motion, and accessibility built in.

• Keep design and code in sync as the system grows, closing gaps when Figma, code, and Storybook fall out of alignment.

• Define what good looks like in the system, set the standards, and hold teams' work to them so it stays consistent, accessible, and high quality.

• Create AI tooling and skills that let all of EPD prototype and build leveraging the system and design best practices.

• Write the documentation, usage guidance, and component rules that let people and AI build with the system correctly across Figma, code, and Storybook.

• Partner with designers, product managers, and engineers on how the system holds up in complex workflows and edge cases, and take those decisions into the system.

Skills you’ll need

• 6+ years building production frontend design systems that serve multiple product surfaces across mobile and web.

• Strong frontend engineering across modern web technologies and component-based architecture, with the ability to ramp quickly in a large, established codebase.

• High UI and UX craft with strong product taste, and a clear read on whether an interface is polished, usable, accessible, flexible, and maintainable.

• Deep experience building and maintaining component libraries, design-token pipelines, Storybook, visual regression, and Figma workflows or plugins.

• Strong accessibility fundamentals across mobile and web.

• Experience standing up or consolidating design systems and aligning Figma libraries with production code.

• Real experience using AI to ship prototypes, components, and system work faster.

• Experience building the resources that make a system usable by AI, the skills, documentation, and rules that let others build against it correctly with AI.

• Strong communication that raises the work around them, explaining decisions clearly to specialists and non-specialists and making the right path the easy one for designers and engineers.

• A bias for building, making ideas real in code, learning from how they behave, and iterating from there.

• Senior judgment to work through ambiguity, focus on the highest-leverage work, and sequence change in a way teams can actually adopt.

• A body of work showing shipped design-engineering impact across production UI, component systems, prototypes, and system documentation.

Nice to have

• Experience with two-sided marketplaces, or products where both sides of a transaction depend on each other.

• Experience designing for healthcare, operations-heavy, or other high-stakes real-world domains.

Location

• Preferred: San Francisco CA/Bay area

• Open to: US remote