Design Engineer, Design System

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TeamPage: https://hexhq.notion.site/Design-Hex-21a4d4a08e23457faad1378455e18ac0

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Hex is looking for a thoughtful, systems-minded Design Engineer to lead and own the next evolution of our product design system (named Spellbook). This role sits within the Design org and partners closely with Product Engineering to build a cohesive, scalable, and high-quality UI foundation.

You will architect, implement, and maintain the primitives that power Hex’s product. This includes components, tokens, documentation, accessibility standards, and advanced interaction patterns. You’ll work closely with designers and engineers to ensure our product experience is crafted with care, consistency, and long-term maintainability in mind.

• Own and lead the design system. Define the roadmap, establish component standards, improve system ergonomics, and shepherd contributions across teams. You’ll be the point person for how our atoms and molecules get built.
• Build for scale and quality. Translate design patterns into robust, accessible components. Develop and maintain tokens, documentation, and tooling to ensure adoption and ease of use.
• Raise the bar through collaboration. Partner deeply with designers and engineers to improve UI quality, visual polish, and cross-product consistency. This includes advocating, educating, and teaching across the org on best practices.
• Prototype and explore. Create prototypes that demonstrate advanced interactions, help validate UX patterns, and influence product direction.

You would be a great fit if you have:

• 7+ years of experience in front-end engineering or design engineering, ideally on a product or design system team
• A strong eye for design, with deep care for layout, motion, affordances, and visual polish
• Expertise in modern front-end technologies, especially Typescript, React, component-driven architectures, and accessibility best practices
• Experience building or maintaining design systems, tokens, components, documentation, governance models
• A portfolio showing UI engineering craft, component thinking, and prototyping ability
• A systems mindset: you think in primitives and abstractions, not one-off solutions
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to articulate rationale and influence cross-functionally
• A collaborative, open-minded approach and comfort working with partners across levels
• Strong attention to detail and a commitment to quality, without losing momentum
• Bonus: experience going deep on major and minor frontend performance problems