Senior Design Engineer - GM Design System

General Motors; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

General Motors seeks a Senior Design Engineer to evolve and scale our enterprise design system for the web. You will collaborate with designers, engineers, and platform teams to build accessible, performant, and reusable components that power consistent experiences across products and platforms.

You’ll help establish patterns, tooling, and standards to support AI-assisted design and development workflows, translate Figma designs into production-ready code, and contribute to design system

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a technical or design field or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years as a Design Engineer or Design Technologist.
• Experience with design systems or UI libraries.
• Strong HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and TypeScript skills.
• Understanding of front-end architecture and scalable CSS.
• Knowledge of WCAG/ARIA accessibility standards.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain a scalable design system using web components.
• Extend system to React and Angular via wrappers and integration.
• Write semantic, accessible HTML with WCAG/ARIA best practices.
• Ensure consistent behavior across browsers and devices.
• Build modular, maintainable CSS for large apps.
• Create reusable components focused on performance and accessibility.
• Translate Figma designs into production-ready code with designers.
• Contribute to design system docs and coding standards.
• Integrate components into CI/CD pipelines and testing processes.
• Explore AI capabilities in design system workflows and docs.

Skills

Design systems

Web Components

Stencil

TypeScript

HTML/CSS

React

ARIA accessibility

AI-enabled workflows

Education

Bachelor’s degree in a technical or design field

Tools

Stencil

Storybook

React

Angular

Jest/Playwright

Job description

Job Description

We’re looking for a Senior Design Engineer to help evolve and scale our enterprise design system for the web. In this role, you’ll collaborate with designers, engineers, and platform teams to build accessible, performant, and reusable components that power consistent experiences across multiple products and platforms. You’ll also contribute to the processes, tools, and standards that enable design excellence at scale, including establishing the patterns and infrastructure needed to support AI‑assisted design and development workflows.

What You’ll Do

• Develop and maintain a scalable design system authored in Stencil and distributed as framework‑agnostic Web Components.
• Extend the system to React and Angular consumers through framework wrappers and integration support.
• Write semantic, accessible HTML aligned with WCAG and WAI‑ARIA best practices, including keyboard navigation, focus management, and screen reader support.
• Ensure consistent behavior across browsers, devices, and assistive technologies.
• Build modular, maintainable CSS for large‑scale applications.
• Build flexible, reusable components with a focus on performance, accessibility, and self‑documentation.
• Translate Figma designs into production‑ready code, collaborating closely with designers.
• Contribute to design system documentation and to the coding standards and best practices that keep it consistent over time.
• Work with engineering teams to integrate components into CI/CD pipelines and support robust testing (unit, visual regression, accessibility).
• Explore and integrate AI capabilities into design system workflows, streamlining component generation, design token mapping, and automated documentation.
• Make the design system consumable by AI coding tools and agents as easily as by people, publishing components, tokens, and usage guidelines in machine‑readable formats with Storybook as the foundation.

Your Skills & Abilities

• A bachelor’s degree in a technical or design related field, or work experience commensurate with education.
• 5+ years of experience working as a professional Design Engineer or Design Technologist.
• Experience building or contributing to design systems or UI libraries.
• Strong experience with modern HTML, modern CSS architecture, vanilla JavaScript, and TypeScript (independent of framework abstractions).
• Solid understanding of front‑end architecture and strategies for scaling CSS in enterprise environments.
• Deep knowledge of semantic HTML, WCAG, and ARIA accessibility standards.
• Experience with progressive enhancement and performance optimization.
• Experience with design tokens, Style Dictionary, or similar tools.
• Hands‑on experience or active experimentation with AI‑enabled design systems, LLM context generation (e.g., custom instructions, rules, or system prompts for code assistants), or AI‑driven UI workflows.

What Will Give You a Competitive Edge (Preferred Qualifications)

• Experience building Web Components
• Experience with React, Angular, or other modern JavaScript frameworks.
• Experience building with Stencil.
• Knowledge of testing frameworks (e.g., Jest, Playwright) and visual regression tools.
• Curiosity for emerging front‑end techniques and a passion for continuous learning.
• Background in web design, design tooling, or collaborating heavily with design teams.

About GM

Our vision is a world with Zero Crashes, Zero Emissions and Zero Congestion and we embrace the responsibility to lead the change that will make our world better, safer and more equitable for all.

Why Join Us

We believe we all must make a choice every day – individually and collectively – to drive meaningful change through our words, our deeds and our culture. Every day, we want every employee to feel they belong to one General Motors team.

Benefits Overview

From day one, we’re looking out for your well‑being at work and at home so you can focus on realizing your ambitions. Learn how GM supports a rewarding career that rewards you personally by visiting Total Rewards resources.

Non-Discrimination and Equal Employment Opportunities (U.S.)

General Motors is committed to being a workplace that is not only free of unlawful discrimination, but one that genuinely fosters inclusion and belonging. We strongly believe that providing an inclusive workplace creates an environment in which our employees can thrive and develop better products for our customers. All employment decisions are made on a non‑discriminatory basis without regard to sex, race, color, national origin, citizenship status, religion, age, disability, pregnancy or maternity status, sexual orientation, gender identity, status as a veteran or protected veteran, or any other similarly protected status in accordance with federal, state and local laws.

Applicants

Applicants in the recruitment process may be required, where applicable, to successfully complete a role‑related assessment(s) and/or a pre‑employment screening prior to beginning employment. To learn more, visit How we Hire.

Accommodations

General Motors offers opportunities to all job seekers including individuals with disabilities.

Explore our global locations

We are determined to lead change for the world through technology, ingenuity and harnessing the creativity of our diverse team. Join us to help lead the change that will make our world better, safer and more equitable for all by becoming a member of GM’s Talent Community (beamery.com). As a part of our Talent Community, you will receive updates about GM, open roles, career insights and more.