Design engineer (UK)

Design engineers sit at the intersection of design and engineering. As a design engineer at WRITER, you'll own the Writer Design System (WDS) — how it's built, how it's maintained, and how both humans and AI agents use it to ship product.

This role matters more now than ever. AI coding agents write more of our production code, and they ship whatever they find. A design system that's incomplete or inconsistent doesn't just slow designers down; it gets compounded at scale by every agent that builds against it. You'll make sure WRITER's core UI library is complete and trustworthy enough to build on, working closely with the designers, PMs, and engineers who rely on it every day. You'll help shape the surfaces that define how our product feels to use, and help set the standard and process for how the EPD org ships product.

This is a hybrid role based out of our San Francisco, Chicago, Austin, New York City, Seattle, or London hubs. This role will be reporting to the Director of product design.

We are open to hiring for this role at multiple levels, with compensation ranges scaled to match your experience, expertise, and the scope of the role.

🦸🏻♀️ What you'll do

Own the Writer Design System (WDS) as your primary domain — agentify and maintain it, ensuring it's optimized for both humans and AI agents building with it

Design and build production-quality UI components and features, owning surfaces from sketch to ship

Ship design-led work that wouldn't survive an engineering backlog — polish passes, micro-interactions, and brand moments that make the product feel alive

Architect new primitives and extend the system's core components, shaping its technical direction while keeping documentation, examples, and libraries in sync across Figma,.md skills, and Storybook

Uphold the bar for front-end craft across accessibility, motion feel, consistency, and quality, ensuring accessibility is baked into every design system component

Help shape the design-to-code workflow, researching the latest tools and practices to unlock org-wide productivity and democratize workflows across the EPD organization

Partner with designers, PMs, and engineering leads to measure WDS adoption, close gaps, and make sure shipped features meet design system standards

⭐️ What you need

4–8+ years building production frontends with TypeScript and React, with a track record of owning a system, platform, or surface end-to-end rather than individual features

Solid instincts for animation principles including easing curves, choreography, anticipation, follow-through, interruptibility, and perceived performance

Fluency in Figma at expert level — auto-layout, variants, variables, and code connect — and proficiency with design engineering technologies like framer-motion, gsap, and lottie for web-based animation

A demonstrable obsession with craft, backed by a portfolio, side projects, GitHub, or production work that includes systems-level work and not just feature work

Experience driving adoption of a design system or shared platform across an engineering org, with a track record of influencing technical or design direction beyond your immediate team

Experience with AI product surfaces — tool-call UIs, streaming responses, agent state, and dynamic UI rendering — and comfort navigating ambiguous, cross-team problems with good judgment about when to loop others in

A genuine commitment to WRITER's values of Connect, Challenge, and Own

🍩 Benefits & perks (UK full-time employees):

Generous PTO, plus company holidays

Comprehensive medical and dental insurance

Paid parental leave for all parents (16 weeks)

Fertility and family planning support

Early-detection cancer testing through Galleri

Competitive pension scheme and company contribution

Annual work-life stipends for:

Wellness stipend for gym, massage/chiropractor, personal training, etc.

Learning and development stipend

Company-wide off-sites and team off-sites

Competitive compensation and company stock options