Software Engineer, Design Systems

Whatnot; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 207,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous holidays

Health insurance

Work from home support

Home office setup allowance

Cell phone/internet allowance

Wellness allowance

Childcare allowance

Parental leave

401k with employer match

Dogfooding budget

Parental leave

Job summary

Whatnot is seeking a Design Systems Engineer to advance the Whatnot Design System across iOS, Android, and web. You will own tokens, tooling, and API design while collaborating closely with product designers to ensure cohesive, accessible experiences across platforms.

You will join a team that values innovation, rapid iteration, and strong design–engineering partnerships, with options to work from home or in hubs in SF or NY.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, related field, or equivalent work experience.
• Shipped production UI on at least two of iOS, Android, and web.
• Experience building or maintaining a design system with tokens and APIs.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration with designers and engineers.
• Attention to accessibility, theming, RTL support, testing, and documentation.
• Bonus: experience with Figma plugins, design-to-code tooling, or AI-assisted workflows.

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve Whatnot Design System components across iOS, Android, and web to ensure consistent, accessible UI.
• Own and extend design token architecture and the automated pipeline from Figma to codebases.
• Partner daily with designers, review specs, and build tooling to keep design and engineering in lockstep.
• Raise quality with accessibility, dark mode, RTL, testing, telemetry, and AI-assisted workflows.

Skills

Swift/SwiftUI

Kotlin/Jetpack

React/TypeScript

Design system

Figma

Design tokens

API design

Accessibility

Cross-functional

AI tooling

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related

Tools

Figma plugins

Storybook

Supernova

Tokens Studio

Job description

Join the Future of Commerce with Whatnot!

Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. Whether it's trading cards, fashion, electronics, or live plants, our sellers are building real businesses across hundreds of categories. We're building live commerce at a scale that's never been done in the West, and there's no playbook to copy. The people here are shaping how an entirely new industry develops. As a remote co-located team, we're inspired by our values and anchored in hubs across the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, Germany, and Australia. We move fast, stay close to our users, and focus on the work that drives the most impact. We're one of the fastest growing marketplaces and were recently named the #1 Best Startup Employer in America by Forbes. Check out the latest Whatnot updates on our news and engineering blogs and join us as we enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce.

Role

The Whatnot Design System (WDS) Is How One Product Ships Coherently Across IOS, Android, And Web. We're In The Middle Of WDS 2.0 — a Ground-up Evolution Of Our Tokens, Components, And The Pipeline That Connects Figma To Production Code On All Three Platforms. As a Design Systems Engineer, You Will

• Build and evolve Whatnot Design System components across iOS (Swift/SwiftUI), Android (Kotlin/Compose), and web (React/TypeScript), so that every team ships consistent, accessible, high-craft UI — measured by component adoption, migration velocity, and reduction of one-off UI in the product.
• Own and extend our design token architecture — base, semantic, and component tokens — and the automated pipeline that syncs them from Figma through our token repository into each platform's codebase, so a change made once lands everywhere without breaking changes.
• Partner daily with product designers as a true collaborator: reviewing specs and redlines, pressure-testing component APIs and naming, flagging gaps between Figma and code, and building the tooling (Figma plugins, code connect, component playgrounds, snapshot galleries) that keeps design and engineering in lockstep.
• Raise the bar on quality and leverage: accessibility by default, dark mode, RTL, haptics, snapshot and visual regression testing, component telemetry, and AI-assisted workflows that turn a Figma component into a first-draft implementation.

We offer flexibility to work from home or from one of our global office hubs, and we value in-person time for planning, problem-solving, and connection. Team members in this role must live within commuting distance of our San Francisco or New York hub.

You

People who do well at Whatnot tend to be comfortable figuring things out as they go, biased toward action, and genuinely curious about what they're building. They care more about outcomes than credit and stay close to the product and the people using it. As our next Design Systems engineer you should have 5+ years of software engineering experience building user-facing products, plus:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• Shipped production UI on at least two of our three platforms — iOS (Swift/SwiftUI), Android (Kotlin/Jetpack Compose), and web (React/TypeScript) — and genuine enthusiasm for flexing across all three. You follow the work to whichever platform needs it most.
• Hands‑on experience building or maintaining a design system: component libraries, design tokens (e.g. Figma variables, Tokens Studio, style-dictionary-like pipelines), versioning and migration strategies, and API design that other engineers love to use.
• A strong track record of cross‑functional collaboration with designers — you're comfortable in Figma, can speak fluently about variants, properties, and auto layout, and treat designers as partners in defining component behavior rather than handing work over a wall.
• Care for the details that make components trustworthy: accessibility (VoiceOver/TalkBack), theming and dark mode, internationalization/RTL, testing (snapshot, visual regression), and documentation.
• Bonus: you've built Figma plugins or design-to-code tooling, worked with documentation platforms like Supernova or Storybook, or used AI agents to accelerate component and token migrations.

Benefits

• Generous Holiday and Time off Policy
• Health Insurance options including Medical, Dental, Vision
• Work From Home Support
  • Home office setup allowance
  • Monthly allowance for cell phone and internet
• Care benefits
  • Monthly allowance for wellness
  • Annual allowance towards Childcare
  • Lifetime benefit for family planning, such as adoption or fertility expenses
• Retirement; 401k offering for Traditional and Roth accounts in the US (employer match up to 4% of base salary) and Pension plans internationally
• Monthly allowance to dogfood the app
  • All Whatnauts are expected to develop a deep understanding of our product. We're passionate about building the best user experience, and all employees are expected to use Whatnot as both a buyer and a seller as part of their job (our dogfooding budget makes this fun and easy!).
• Parental Leave
  • 16 weeks of paid parental leave + one month gradual return to work *company leave allowances run concurrently with country leave requirements which take precedence.

EOE

Whatnot is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, parental status, disability status, or any other status protected by local law. We believe that our work is better and our company culture is improved when we encourage, support, and respect the different skills and experiences represented within our workforce.

Compensation Range: $207K - $230K