About the job
Location: Austin, TX (Hybrid: 2 to 3 days onsite per week)
Role overview
The Senior Staff Systems Design Engineer at Weedmaps leads the transformation of the company’s design system into a scalable, production-ready foundation. This position connects Design, Engineering, and AI tooling, focusing on building, operationalizing, and scaling the system for all user interface surfaces. The role balances rapid development with high standards for usability and craftsmanship, ensuring alignment with engineering architecture and consistency across applications. Collaboration is central, working with Engineering (CI/CD, tokens, tooling), Creative (brand cohesion and evolution), and Product Design (development and iteration) to drive adoption and improve the product experience.
What you will do
- Define and iterate on a multi-platform system for web and mobile, grounded in solid architecture, governance, and scalability principles.
- Own the system roadmap, setting priorities based on product needs, adoption gaps, and system performance.
- Collaborate with Design and Creative leaders to ensure quality craftsmanship, modern interaction patterns, and alignment with evolving brand standards.
- Design and implement core system components, including intuitive, flexible, and scalable APIs, variants, and composition patterns.
- Maintain high standards for visual accuracy, fidelity, accessibility (using React Aria), and interaction quality, including motion and state management.
- Continuously improve components based on real product usage and edge case scenarios.
- Implement automated quality systems such as visual regression testing, and conduct ongoing audits to uphold usability and craftsmanship, taking a cross-functional approach to quality.
- Lead migration of legacy user interfaces, ensuring smooth integration of key product surfaces (like CTAs and checkout flows) powered by the design system to increase adoption across the platform.
- Enhance Developer Experience by creating well-structured, intuitive component APIs that balance flexibility and simplicity.
- Establish a reliable tool-to-code pipeline (Figma, Claude, Builder, and others) to keep design artifacts and production components in sync and minimize drift.
- Partner with Engineering on architectural decisions (CI/CD, token systems, distribution infrastructure) and support enforcement mechanisms such as linting and token constraints to maintain system integrity.
- Introduce and standardize AI-assisted workflows, structure components for AI-friendly generation, and integrate tools (Builder.io, Gemini, and others) to improve consistency.
- Mentor designers and engineers, sharing best practices and guiding system usage to foster a strong, knowledgeable community.
