Design Engineer

About the role

We're looking for a design engineer to lead the next generation of Assembled's design system. You'll define the visual and interaction foundations of our product, building the components, patterns, and design language that help every team ship cohesive, accessible, high-quality experiences faster. You'll shape the foundation that every product team builds on, raising the bar for how the entire product looks, feels, and works as Assembled continues to grow.

This is also a chance to help define what design systems look like in AI-native products. Beyond the system itself, you'll establish the reusable patterns that underpin great agentic UX—how people direct, trust, and collaborate with AI. You’ll also partner closely with our Design Systems Engineer to pioneer AI-assisted ways of designing, building, and evolving the system. It's a role for someone who loves visual craft and systems thinking in equal measure, and gets excited by turning great product decisions into patterns that elevate an entire platform.

This is an onsite role based in our San Francisco office, five days a week (Monday–Friday).

What you'll own

• Lead the next generation of Assembled's design system. Define the visual language, interaction foundations, components, and patterns that help every product team build cohesive, accessible, high-quality experiences across desktop and mobile.

• Establish how the system evolves. Create the documentation, contribution model, and governance that help designers and engineers adopt the system, extend it thoughtfully, and know when new patterns belong.

• Define reusable interaction patterns for AI-native products. Create reusable interaction patterns for how people direct, trust, review, and collaborate with AI agents, establishing a shared language that scales across our products.

• Pioneer AI-assisted design-system workflows. In partnership with our Design Systems Engineer, use coding agents to generate production-quality UI, understand how components are used, measure adherence, and help teams move from design to implementation faster.

• Extend the system through our hardest product problems. Partner with product teams to rethink data-dense, high-complexity workflows, turning solutions to real enterprise needs into reusable patterns that improve the entire product.

What excites us

• 4+ years designing and shipping production B2B software, with meaningful ownership of a design system used across multiple teams or products.

• Exceptional visual craft. You have a sharp eye and a high bar, and it shows in everything you ship.

• You love systems thinking as much as craft. You think in primitives and reusable patterns, you sweat how the details add up, and you're driven to see a great decision embedded consistently across an entire product — not just shipped once. You balance simplicity with flexibility as the product grows.

• You’ve built the machinery, not just used it. You have hands-on experience structuring Figma libraries, tokens, variables, components and documentation for use across multiple teams.

• You understand how design systems reach production. You can collaborate fluently with frontend engineers on component APIs, responsive behavior, accessibility, states and implementation tradeoffs—even if you do not write production code yourself.

• You know how to enable other designers. You create systems that are approachable, explain your decisions clearly and help teams apply patterns well without becoming a bottleneck.

• You move quickly. You're biased toward shipping, comfortable with ambiguity, and prefer real user feedback and testing rather than perfecting in isolation.

• You're excited about AI-native design workflows and how a design system can guide and accelerate what both people and agents build.

• You're a strong communicator who collaborates closely with engineering and brings designers, engineers, and leadership along with your thinking.

Nice to have

• You get into the code (or the tooling). You've used coding or design agents (Cursor, Claude, Figma AI, and whatever comes next) to build, prototype, or ship, and you want to own more of the path from idea to reality.

• Experience instrumenting or measuring design-system adoption/adherence, or running large-scale component migrations.

Our U.S. benefits

• Generous medical, dental, and vision benefits

• Flexible time off

• Monthly credits for professional development, general wellness, Assembled customers, and commuting

• Paid parental leave

• Catered lunches every day (M–F) and fully stocked SF office

• 401(k) plan enrollment

The estimated base salary range for this role is $150,000 - $215,000 per year. The base pay offered may vary depending on location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Stock options are provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the position offered.