UX Engineer - Design Systems & Product Interfaces

Knapsack Company; Oregon (IL); Remote; USD 110,000 - 115,000; Full time

Job summary

Knapsack is seeking a UX Engineer to enhance the front-end experience at their fully remote company. This role involves building interactive tools for customers and collaborating closely with design and engineering teams to improve user interface and product functionality.

Benefits

Equity

Unlimited PTO

Fully covered health insurance

Flexible, remote-first work culture

Qualifications

• 3-5+ years of production-level front-end code experience.
• Strong fluency in front-end technologies.
• Experience with design systems and collaborating with design teams.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain product UI in React.
• Collaborate with designers to validate workflows.
• Extend and refine design system implementation.

Skills

HTML

CSS

JavaScript

TypeScript

React

Debugging

Job description

Join Knapsack to bridge the gap between design and engineering through code, systems thinking, and thoughtful execution. Help build a platform where structured UI, design systems, and real product tooling come together to drive intelligent product development.

Overview

We’re hiring a UX Engineer to help shape and scale the front-end experience of Knapsack. You’ll work closely with designers and engineers to build functional, expressive, and scalable UI — especially in the parts of the product where design systems come to life: token editing, component management, system configuration, and documentation.

This is a hybrid role for someone who codes like an engineer, thinks like a designer, and brings a strong sense of craft to everything they build. You’ll be focused on the core product experience — the tools our customers use every day to structure, maintain, and evolve their design systems.

About Knapsack

Knapsack is a platform for managing and scaling design systems in real products. We help teams bring structure, consistency, and collaboration to the way they design and build user interfaces. Our product connects tools like Figma and Git to a shared, living source of truth — making it easier to manage tokens, components, documentation, and workflows across the product development lifecycle.

Design systems aren’t just style guides anymore — they’re dynamic, evolving systems that power real software. Knapsack provides the infrastructure and tooling to support that evolution, whether you’re working across teams, maintaining complex UI libraries, or trying to bring design and engineering closer together.

We’re not chasing trends. We’re building a real product that real teams use to solve everyday challenges in design system management and front-end delivery.

What we think you’ll do

Depending on your strengths and how the product evolves, you might:

• Build and maintain product UI in React — including token editors, component views, and configuration tooling
• Extend and refine our design system implementation, including component logic, interaction patterns, and layout behavior
• Translate Figma designs into scalable, accessible, and production-ready components
• Collaborate with designers early in the process to test ideas and validate workflows
• Debug tricky UI issues, even when they aren’t obviously visual or design-related
• Work with engineering to improve how structured UI data is used throughout the platform
• Contribute to better system-wide interaction quality, polish, and performance

What we think you’ll need

• 3–5+ years writing production-level front-end code in a modern framework (React preferred)
• Strong fluency in HTML, CSS/SCSS, and JavaScript/TypeScript
• Deep familiarity with Figma and how to collaborate with design teams
• Experience implementing and scaling design systems — components, tokens, and documentation
• A designer’s eye — attention to spacing, layout, interaction, and motion
• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills, including cross-functional issues
• Comfort working independently and driving your own area of the product
• Experience working inside product teams, not just marketing or web projects

Bonus points for

• Experience with structured design system platforms (e.g., Knapsack, Storybook, Backlight)
• Familiarity with component metadata, design token formats, or structured UI inputs
• Background in creative coding, motion design, or rapid prototyping
• Experience building tools for design/engineering teams
• Interest in how structured UI data powers AI workflows and reasoning

Why it matters

This isn’t a styling role or a handoff job. It’s a real product role at the intersection of design systems, engineering, and UX. You’ll build the tools our users interact with every day — and shape how design data becomes living product UI.

If you’ve ever said:

“I’d rather build the system than just design it”

“I think in components and care about interaction quality”

“I want to work on a real product with real users and real impact”

…then let’s talk.

Location

Remote friendly (US-based). Knapsack is a fully remote company, headquartered in Portland, OR.

Compensation & Benefits

• $110k - $115k salary +equity
• Flexible, remote-first work culture
• Unlimited PTO
• Fully covered health insurance
• A thoughtful, ambitious team building something truly original