Staff Design Engineer

About the role

You are a Staff-level design engineer who owns the future of Juniper Square's design system and its integration into the product's core workflows. You define the standards, systems, and strategy that align design and engineering as the platform scales in complexity. This role requires you to build and maintain the infrastructure that turns design decisions into high-quality, production-ready code. You will set the vision for how AI is embedded into the design-to-engineering lifecycle, ensuring that the system serves both user needs and business goals. You are expected to write code to prototype and validate solutions while also establishing the governance models that keep the system sustainable. Ultimately, you will shape what great UI quality looks like across hundreds of products and thousands of users.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Own the design system strategy and roadmap: define what the system needs to become, set priorities, establish governance, and build the contribution model that makes it sustainable as the team and product grow.
• Define the AI enablement strategy for design-to-engineering: determine how AI tools are integrated into the workflow from prototype to production, and build the systems that make the whole team faster and higher-quality.
• Set the technical direction for UI quality across the product: define what good looks like, establish the standards and processes that maintain it, and make the case for that standard across design and engineering leadership.
• Identify systemic quality gaps: look across the product surface and name the patterns no one else is naming, then build the plan to address them.
• Build the infrastructure that lets designers ship in code: not by doing it yourself, but by creating the workflows, tooling, and templates that make it a sustainable part of the design team's practice.
• Partner with Design and Engineering leadership to shape the long-term direction of how the two functions collaborate, where the boundaries are, and how they evolve.
• Write production-grade code that serves as the reference implementation for components, ensuring consistency, accessibility, and performance across the platform.
• Drive adoption of the design system by working directly with product teams, removing blockers, and evangelizing best practices through documentation and enablement.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience working across design and front-end engineering, with a portfolio that demonstrates both craft and leadership impact.
• Experience building and scaling a design system in a complex product environment, including decisions around component architecture, tokenization, and theming.
• A strong track record of partnering with cross-functional stakeholders to align on goals, solve ambiguous problems, and drive execution without direct authority.
• Demonstrated ability to balance trade-offs between design aspirations, engineering constraints, and business timelines while maintaining quality standards.
• Comfort working in a fast-paced, high-growth environment where priorities shift and problems are complex and ambiguous.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills to articulate design system decisions to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience contributing to open source or building internal tools that scale across multiple teams is required.
• Willingness to deeply learn and leverage Juniper Square's domain in fund accounting, investor portals, and data-heavy reporting workflows to build relevant solutions.

Nice to have

• Experience with AI tools in the design-to-engineering workflow, including prompt engineering, model fine-tuning, or building internal AI platforms.
• Background in regulated industries where compliance, auditability, and data integrity are critical.
• Experience contributing to or maintaining design systems that serve enterprise-level customers across multiple products.

Practical notes

This role is full-time and based in the Americas, requiring eligibility to work in the USA or Canada. The position may involve occasional travel within the Americas region as needed for team collaboration or company events. Visas may be sponsored for qualified candidates. The role is not structured for contract-to-hire.